iHeart’s Streaming Conquest Means It Must Be More Benevolent To Others

Seventeen years after launching the iHeartRadio app, iHeartMedia can now claim it has won the broadcast streaming platform wars.

Monday’s addition of Audacy’s stations to the platform is a concession by its largest competitor that it does not have the will to compete. iHeart has now brought together stations from Alpha Media, Beasley Media Group, Cox Media Group, Entravision, MediaCo, Midwest Communications, Radio One, Salem Media Group, SBS, Univision plus their own, Audacy, and many smaller operators onto one platform. Just like many of their competitors are reliant on iHeart owned services such as Katz Media Group for national sales representation, Premiere Networks for programming content, or RCS for music scheduling, automation, or Mediabase charts, this adds another facet of the industry where iHeartMedia is in defacto control of its business competition. In at least some form they all rely on iHeart for something.

And this is where iHeart must become a little more benevolent towards its comrades. For years if you were to search for a station from a competing operator, iHeart would try to direct listeners to one of their stations. For example, if you searched for “KROQ” it would point a listener to its Alternative station in Los Angeles, “Alt 98.7” KYSR. When I tried the search this afternoon, not only was KYSR still the first result, but KROQ’s live stream was buried behind KYSR and then a few podcasts. If that’s still a matter of KROQ not having enough people searching for it in the first few days I’ll give them benefit of the doubt, so I tried looking up another brand that overlaps with an iHeart station. (UPDATE 7/2: The KROQ search results have been revised)

I searched next for Cumulus Media’s “New Country 101.5” WKHX Atlanta which competes directly with iHeart’s “94.9 The Bull” WUBL. I was pleased to see that WUBL does not appear on those search results, however it is still not the top search result as it is behind a podcast feed for iHeart’s 101.5 WYNK Baton Rouge!

Next I tried to look up a brand used by iHeart, Audacy, and Alpha Media in various markets, “Mix 106.5“. The result of this one was the most baffling as the top result went to Grupo ACIR’s station of that name in Mexico City followed by another Mexican station. Audacy’s WWMX Baltimore was the third result and Alpha Media’s KEZR San Jose CA fourth followed by iHeart’s WQLX Chillicothe OH.

With the iHeart app now locked in as the industry standard for streaming broadcast stations these and other issues will need to be resolved. Some are completely out of iHeart’s hands and in those of the originating stations. If you don’t know the logo of a station how is someone who searches for “Mix 96.5” supposed to identify between Audacy’s Houston station or Cox’s Tulsa station?

At this point any station or group holding out needs to reconsider placing their stations on the iHeart app as it will only help the industry as a whole by having every station in one place. But I do not blame Bonneville, Hubbard, Saga, Townsquare or any other holdout from remaining to do so until every station is on an equal playing field. And that goes down to being able the same analytics and even features like talkback that iHeart’s stations have internally.

Audacy realized it needs to be where any listeners are just as Alpha, Beasley, Cumulus and others did before them. But they need to be not treated like a second-class citizen for doing so as they will be driving more scale to iHeart.

Audacy’s app will still be there, but by placing their stations first on TuneIn and now iHeart they are admitting their app will never reach critical mass. iHeart is the only one capable of doing so unless the NAB or another organization (Apple? Xperi?) creates something that becomes the default tuner in everyone’s phone and dashboard.

It’s up to iHeart to be our benevolent dictator for the sake of radio’s streaming future.