As it attempts to make more terrestrial radio listeners aware of podcasting, iHeartMedia is launching “Sunday Night Podcasts” programming across all of its stations this week.
The series will kick off with this weeks season premiere of the Ron Burgundy Podcast airing across 270 stations in the CHR, Hot AC, Country, Rock, Urban, and News/Talk formats. Future weeks will include other iHeartMedia owned shows such as “Stuff You Should Know”, “Ridiculous History”, “Atlanta Monster”, and Bob Pittman’s “Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing”.
iHeartMedia, the leading audio company in America and the No. 1 commercial podcast publisher globally according to Podtrac, announced today the premiere of its new “Sunday Night Podcasts” programming. Sunday Night Podcasts will air the most popular and highly-anticipated podcasts from the iHeartPodcast Network across multiple genres, including comedy, true crime, business, history, technology, culture and more, on hundreds of iHeartMedia broadcast stations – enabling these podcasts to reach millions of new listeners.
Sunday Night Podcasts will debut with season two, episode one of “The Ron Burgundy Podcast,” an iHeartRadio Original Podcast co-produced by iHeartMedia and Funny Or Die, this Sunday, August 11 across 270 of iHeartMedia’s broadcast stations, spanning a variety of music and spoken word radio formats including CHR, Hot AC, Country Rock, Urban, News/Talk and more.
Sunday Night Podcasts is part of iHeartMedia’s innovative “Podcast, Meet Broadcast” initiative that utilizes the company’s unparalleled consumer reach to introduce the rapidly growing podcast sector to iHeartMedia’s quarter of a billion monthly broadcast listeners. The upcoming Sunday Night Podcasts include but are not limited to:
(Broadcast times and podcasts vary by station format)
§ “The Ron Burgundy Podcast”
§ “Stuff You Should Know”
§ “Ridiculous History”
§ “Atlanta Monster”
§ “Stuff You Missed in History Class”
§ “TechStuff”
§ “Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing”
§ “Whine Down with Jana Kramer”
§ “Hell and Gone”
§ “The Ben and Ashley I. Almost Famous Podcast”
§ “Happy Face”“We’re thrilled to bring some of the world’s best and most popular podcasts to our broadcast listeners every Sunday,” said Conal Byrne, President of the iHeartPodcast Network. “iHeartMedia reaches 91 percent of the U.S. population with just our broadcast radio stations alone, so we’re uniquely able to provide the scale critical to introducing podcasts to the millions of Americans who aren’t yet familiar with them. Research shows that more than two-thirds of the population still are not dedicated podcast listeners — many have never even heard a podcast before — and Sunday Night Podcasts will help introduce different audio series from a variety of genres to a whole new audience.”
iHeartMedia’s “Podcast, Meet Broadcast” strategy has shown proven results with shows like the hit true-crime podcast “Disgraceland,” which aired on more than 70 Classic Rock broadcast radio stations in March of this year and saw a massive increase in listening yielding more than double the amount of the podcast’s typical downloads in the week following the broadcast. In addition, iHeartMedia has premiered episodes of “Family Secrets” and “Monster: The Zodiac Killer” exclusively on iHeartMedia’s broadcast radio stations across the country before they were available anywhere else.
iHeartMedia first leveraged its “Podcast, Meet Broadcast” strategy in October 2017, when Mark Ramsey’s much lauded “Inside Psycho” aired as a 1-hour special on more than 70 iHeartMedia News/Talk stations across the country. In June 2018, iHeartMedia announced a first-of-its-kind agreement with actor Anna Faris and Unqualified Media to bring her hit podcast, “Anna Faris is Unqualified,” to Top 40 broadcast radio and the iHeartPodcast Network.
iHeartMedia has continued to invest heavily in podcasting, from acquiring HowStuffWorks in 2018 to producing an ongoing slate of new iHeartRadio Original shows like “The Ron Burgundy Podcast,” “Disgraceland,” “Chelsea Handler: Life will be the Death of Me,” “Noble Blood” and “Committed,” as well as fostering over a hundred shows from its on-air talent like the popular “Bobbycast” and “The Breakfast Club” radio show podcasts. These shows are distributed on all major podcast platforms, including the iHeartRadio app, which additionally distributes more than 250,000 shows.
