They don't have a CEO right now. At some point, the lenders who now run the company will get someone to take that job. Hopefully it'll be someone who understands the situation. Because traditional radio isn't growing. The old business of playing records with DJs and commercials doesn't work anymore.
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Local Layoffs at Audacy (and a Resignation), the 2025 Edition
- Thread starter Joey1986
- Start date
They don't have a CEO right now. At some point, the lenders who now run the company will get someone to take that job. Hopefully it'll be someone who understands the situation. Because traditional radio isn't growing. The old business of playing records with DJs and commercials doesn't work anymore.
And, just like they did with radio, iHeart will eventually destroy their digital business by overloading it with ads, pop-ups, paywalls, etc.
Entercom changed the company name to Audacy. That's about all they've done. Traditional Radio may not recover from the "Strokes" you mentioned. However, it's still about content. Just transferring mediocre product to other platforms isn't the answer. The Internet is saturated with ridiculous amateur Podcasts.
A certain amount of Hubris has been a problem for Radio upper management. The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable...
It's also saturated with exceptionally well-produced ones from major companies including iHeart. Enough to fill a top 200 weekly chart and not hit amateur hour:
Apple's Top Podcast Charts - United States
Daily rankings of the 0 top podcasts in United States on Apple. View historical charts, popularity scores, and insights.
www.podchaser.com
Thinking about "what radio has left," it is the ability to be local and focus on a local audience. Sure, some podcasts can do it. But radio has a history of it. Is there any way to harness that "local" aspect into an audience? Perhaps it can work in the largest and smallest of markets. But I do not know how it would work in the majority of markets...
It evaporated from radio because the audience demonstrated that it did not care in sufficient numbers.
MassMusicMan
Banned
Real terms, or inflation-adjusted?
That's your view. For people who didn't grow up with radio, that's obviously not the view. Spotify spent lots of money on Joe Rogan. They have no shortage of money for talent. They put that money into podcasting, not linear radio. People who own radio can see that.
Focusing on the local audience only matters if it's a local sports team. In LA, you have lots of local talent on the radio. Does it make a difference? You tell me. When KLOS fired Kevin & Sluggo, the ratings didn't move. People clearly listen to these stations for the music, not because it's local.
MassMusicMan
Banned
Thank you for saying it out loud. Most localities aren't interesting. When I programmed in Rutland, VT, I made it my mission to make sure the audience forgot that they lived in Rutland, VT. Is it a horrible place? No. Should the morning show go out of its way to not offer an escape to people driving to their terrible jobs? Also no.
My view is that if you have local talent, people need to SEE them. That's why I like that idea of iHeart doing it's morning show from a local casino. People aren't glued to the radio. They want to see video. If you're local, you need to prove it every day. You have to be in their face. You need to upload video to TikTok and social media. Otherwise, you're a tree falling in an empty forest.
MassMusicMan
Banned
I would have liked to have been out more. Unfortunately, I was busy also being the PD and half the production director.
I can think of 100 communities that would prove you wrong. Sorry about Rutland, Vermont.
The problem, though, is that people wanted entertainment more than they wanted information. Stations wanting to increase their quarter-hour shares eliminated "interruptions" and that came to include news, weather and sports ("people get that from the evening tv local news").
Eventually in eliminating perceived negatives, radio had no perceived positives that a different medium couldn't duplicate and, in fact, improve on.
There's really very little done on broadcast radio that can't also be done digitally. The only difference is the reception device.
What's interesting is when streaming services hire talent, it doesn't attract mass audiences. As I always say: Name all the big name DJs at Spotify or Apple Music. It's not that they don't do hosted linear programming. They do. It's just that it's not why people use those services.
Traditional radio (even those who are attempting to transition to streaming) are not spending a lot of money for talent. Period. Last time I checked, Audacy isn't investing in finding the "next Joe Rogan" to put on a podcast, or throwing the kind of money that Sirius/XM threw at Howard Stern to lure him away from traditional broadcast radio. No, they don't have a CEO right now (as the previous one ran them into bankruptcy), but you said:
Hopefully? No, the old business of playing records with DJs and commercials doesn't work anymore. It hasn't worked for a long time. Yet when I left radio six years ago, they were still focusing on getting listeners to hang on through the stopset to get the "payoff" for the "tease" that had been previewed before the concert promo leading into the break and the "text to win" promo coming out. As Mr. Hagerty pointed out above, there ARE plenty of creative, well-produced podcasts out there, but I don't know that Audacy got that memo. Hoping the next Audacy CEO "gets it" is very much of a "barn door's been open for a long time...how do we get the horses back?" situation.
Really? Have you talked to some of the hosts at iHeart lately? I know this thread is about Audacy, but I wouldn't generalize about radio based on Audacy.
I don't disagree with you. But I was thinking more of the ability to focus on local events, such as the wildfires (in addition to sports teams, like you mentioned). There's also a very large audience for hyper-local politics in many parts of the country.
Okay, so there's possibly the justification for two stations in a market, as long as those markets are large enough to justify the costs of news coverage and large enough to have sports teams with significant fan bases.
Fixed that for you.
Yeah, I really don't see that. There is a significant partisan lean to just about every elected office, and officeholders, would-be-opponents and the media all know that. It's such that whichever party is in the minority in a district often has difficulty recruiting candidates for offices.
If you're in a strong red area or strong blue area, there's basically nothing to talk about and no one to talk with. Whoever is in power has little incentive to stick their head out, and whoever is out of power has no clear spokesperson.
The other problem with local politics is that there are dozens of municipal governments in a typical media market. If you're talking with the mayor of Burbank, you're not talking about 95% or more of the LA market.
I wish there was more coverage of the nuts-and-bolts of local governance, but the audience for that appears to be vanishingly small.
I was talking about DJs. You're talking about news coverage. Two different things. In Los Angeles, you have KNX and KFI. as well as KPCC.
Radio is not one thing. You have lots of stations, lots of different owners, and lots of ways to approach what they do.
MassMusicMan
Banned
I told my PMD out-of-market voice tracker when I was in Rutland that he wouldn't be reading fixed weather forecasts anymore. Of course, this being the Northeast, the weather is the star, so I advised and encouraged him to deliver weather content as a personality break, not as news content.
The example I gave him was a Facebook post I made after a snowstorm. "I invented a new dance. It involves turning away as you shovel snow, because your pile is into the wind."
After I left, they replaced me with a guy who had never set foot in Vermont prior to relocating. His idea of programming was to stop the music during afternoon drive to report on a highway storm warning 70 miles from the station, well outside of the listening area.