iHeartMedia faces new layoffs amid industrial struggles, debt woes

The world’s largest broadcaster, iHeartMedia, has made another round of layoffs in recent days as the debt-ridden radio industry continues to contract in the era of music streaming. “Right now, it looks like the business model they’ve had for the last few years of having one person do the job of 40 people is where it’s going,” says Nick Jordanan assistant program director for Raleigh, NC, country station WNCB until he lost his iHeart job on Monday (Nov. 4). “But we did a good job as long as we could, keeping everything local and locally oriented.”

A representative for iHeart, which owns 860 stations in 160 U.S. markets and advertises “there’s a local iHeartRadio station pretty much everywhere,” would not specify the number of recent layoffs, which follow a wave of layoffs in March and others since the pandemic. Radio news such as Radio and music professionals and Barrett Media listed more than a dozen names laid off this week, including morning show hosts, promotion and programming executives and metropolitan regional directors. Jordan said he watched a video Monday morning of Bill Squire, an iHeart colleague who lost his job in Cleveland, when “one of the big bosses” walked into his own station to deliver the news.

“S— happens,” says Jordan, 31, a nine-year industry veteran. “It’s part of the radio business.”

Although radio listenership has declined, according to some studies, the business remains robust, attracting 82% of American adults by 2022. And while major labels like Universal and Atlantic have similarly laid off radio promotion staff over the past year, the medium is. is still important for breaking hits, especially in country and other genres.

According to Wendy Goldbergan iHeart spokesman said “very few jobs” have been affected at the 10,000-employee company. She rejects data that suggests a decline in audience consumption.

“Our broadcast radio audience has more listeners than it did 10 years ago,” she says, referring to a Nielsen survey showing that younger listeners increased slightly in the third quarter of this year. She adds that iHeart remains “the No. 1 podcast publisher, bigger than the next two combined, and we’re five times the size of the second-largest digital radio service.”

“We have been able to achieve this by modernizing the business and increasing our use of technology,” Goldberg said in a statement. “These changes are another step in that journey.”

Squire, a stand-up comedian who has hosted the Alan Cox Show on Cleveland rock station WMMR since 2013, received the news of his firing by phone Monday at 1 p.m. 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 album We’re Getting Famous, says the radio industry is “cutting costs wherever they can.” While Jordan is hopeful that “the pendulum will swing back a little bit,” Squire says of media cutbacks: “You see it on radio, you see it on TV, a lot of Hollywood is out of business right now. The entertainment landscape has changed is moving so fast with the Internet and YouTube and podcasts that legacy media is just trying to catch up and figure out how to adapt.”