So This Is Love was Spotify's most-streamed podcast in Kenya in 2023 and 2025. Its last episode landed on 23 April, yet on 13 July it still holds #5 on Apple's Kenya chart, behind three DJ mix feeds and Mic Cheque.
Open the Apple Podcasts chart for Kenya this week and the top of the table looks like a DJ booth. Mix feeds from DJ Shinski, DJ Simple Simon and Tophaz hold the first three places, with Mic Cheque Podcast at four. Then, at number five, sits a show that has not published an episode since April. So This Is Love, Julia Gaitho's fortnightly heartbreak confessional, holds a top-five position on Apple's Top Podcasts chart for Kenya on catalogue listening alone, roughly eleven weeks after its last upload. Strip out the mix feeds and it is the second-biggest conversational podcast in the country, on a chart it has done nothing to feed since the end of April.
The show is easy to describe and hard to copy. Gaitho, who goes by Jules, hosts solo. Guests come on to tell the story of a past relationship, usually without giving their names, and the Apple Podcasts listing frames the territory as "love, the loss of love, heartbreak and the meeting of self". Episodes arrive roughly every two weeks, filed under Society and Culture, and listeners have kept it at 4.8 out of 5 across 999 ratings. Anonymity is the engine. Nobody is promoting an album or a comedy tour. The guest has nothing to sell, so the story is the whole product.
The chart afterlife is not a fluke. Spotify named So This Is Love Kenya's most-streamed podcast of 2023, ahead of The Messy Inbetween and It's Related, I Promise, and put Gaitho among its Breakout Creators for the year. In 2024 the crown slipped: The97sPodcast took the top spot and So This Is Love finished second. Then it took the title back. A Spotify report in early September 2025 already had the show at number one, and Wrapped confirmed it in December: first in Kenya for 2025, ahead of The97sPodcast, The Diary Of A CEO and Mic Cheque Podcast, with "Sophia & Bumpy" and "Grace & Malcolm" the standout episodes. Two year-end crowns in three years, and the dip in between was reversed, not managed.
A show that holds a national chart through eleven weeks of silence has stopped being a schedule. It is a back catalogue with gravity.
The silence itself is easy to date. Season 6 opened on 4 December 2025 with "Makena & David", per the show's Apple listing, and kept the usual fortnightly rhythm until "Smurf & Bill", the tenth episode of the season and the show's 63rd overall, landed on 23 April at one hour and 56 minutes. Nothing since. Most podcasts drop off a national chart within a few weeks of going quiet, because charts reward fresh uploads and the algorithmic push that comes with them. This one is coasting on people finding the archive and staying in it, two-hour episode after two-hour episode.
Between seasons it has also shown it can turn listening into a room. On 6 September 2025 the show staged its first standalone live event, in partnership with Spotify Africa and with support from ABSA Kenya and Eyaly Skin, under the theme "Owning the Love You Give Away". Gaitho reported on LinkedIn that it sold out in advance and that a guest appeared un-anonymised for the first time. KBC's preview of the day billed the show in Spotify's live sessions alongside TMI and The Sandwich Podcast. A bank and a skincare brand paying to attach themselves to anonymous heartbreak stories tells you where Kenyan sponsors think the attention is.
None of this began with a strategy deck. Season 1 went out as video on Gaitho's YouTube channel, My Tiny Little Channel, where the first episode, "Melody and Kevin", is still up; the show's audio feed dates its start to 13 October 2022. Under four years from a personal channel upload to two national year-end titles and a brand-backed sold-out live show is quick work in any market.
There is a lesson here that should worry anyone building a Kenyan show around celebrity guests. The most bankable genre in the country's podcasting right now is confessional storytelling, told by people you cannot name. It survives a broken release schedule. It fills a paid room. It keeps a 4.8 rating through five seasons of other people's worst decisions. The open question is what the quiet eventually costs. Mic Cheque is one place ahead on Apple. The97sPodcast took the Spotify crown the last time So This Is Love had a soft year, and year-end charts have shorter memories than heartbroken listeners. Catalogue gravity is real, but it behaves like a loan rather than a pension. Season 6 could use a second half.