The world's largest broadcaster, iHeartMedia, has laid off another round of workers in recent days as the debt-plagued radio industry continues to shrink in the era of streaming music. “Right now, it looks like the business model they've had for the last few years, of having one person do the jobs of 40 people, is where it's going,” he says. Nick Jordanassistant program director at Raleigh, NC, country station WNCB until he lost his job at iHeart on Monday (Nov. 4). “But we did a good job, for as long as we could, of keeping everything local and community-oriented.”
A spokesman for iHeart, which owns 860 stations in 160 U.S. markets and advertises that “there's a local iHeartRadio station almost everywhere,” would not specify the number of recent layoffs, which followed a wave of job cuts in March and others from the pandemic. Radio media such as Radio and music professionals and Barrett Media have listed more than a dozen names out this week, including morning show hosts, promotion and programming executives and regional managers for major cities. Jordan said he was watching a video Monday morning of Bill Squire, an iHeart colleague who lost his job in Cleveland, when “one of the big bosses” came into his own station to break the news.
“S— it happens,” says Jordan, 31, a nine-year industry veteran. “It's part of the radio business.”
Although radio listening has declined, according to some studies, the business remains resilient, reaching 82% of American adults by 2022. And while majors like Universal and Atlantic have respectively laid off radio promotion staff over the past year, the medium is still important for hits, especially in country and other genres.
According to Wendy GoldbergAn iHeart spokesperson said “very few jobs” have been affected at the 10,000-employee company. It refutes data that suggests a decline in audience consumption.
“Our radio audience has more listeners than it did 10 years ago,” he says, citing a Nielsen study showing younger listeners increased slightly in the third quarter of this year. He adds that iHeart remains “the No. 1 podcast publisher, bigger than the next two combined and we're five times bigger than the next biggest digital radio service.”
“We were able to achieve this by modernizing the company and increasing our use of technology,” Goldberg says in a statement. “These changes are another step in that journey.”
Squire, a stand-up comedian who has co-hosted The Alan Cox Show on Cleveland rock station WMMR since 2013, received the news of his firing by phone Monday morning. “They assured me it wasn't performance-based: 'There are big cuts in the company and there's nothing they can do,'” he recalls.
Squire, who plans to return to the road as a touring comic promoting his We're Getting Famous album, says the radio business is “cutting costs where it can”. While Jordan hopes “the pendulum will swing back a little bit,” Squire says of the media cutbacks: “You see it on the radio, you see it on TV, a lot of Hollywood is out right now. The entertainment industry has changed so quickly with the Internet and YouTube and podcasts that legacy media is just trying to catch up and figure out how to adapt to it.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/iheartmedia-layoffs-radio-industry-struggles-debt-woes/
