iHeartMedia Faces Fresh Wave of Layoffs Amid Industry Struggles, Debt Woes

The world’s biggest broadcast company, iHeartMedia, has laid off another round of employees in recent days, as the debt-plagued radio industry continues to contract during the music-streaming era. “Right now, it seems like the business model they’ve had the last few years, of making one person do 40 people’s jobs, is where it’s going,” says Nick Jordan, an assistant program director of Raleigh, N.C., country station WNCB until he lost his iHeart job Monday (Nov. 4). “But we did a good job, for as long as we could, keeping everything local and community-oriented.”

A rep for iHeart, which owns 860 stations in 160 U.S. markets and advertises “there’s a local iHeartRadio station virtually everywhere,” would not specify the number of recent layoffs, which follows a wave of job cuts in March and others since the pandemic. Radio-news outlets such as Radio and Music Pros and Barrett Media have listed more than a dozen laid-off names this week, including morning-show hosts, promotion and programming execs and big-city regional directors. 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” 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 resilient, drawing 82% of adult Americans as of 2022. And while major labels such as Universal and Atlantic have correspondingly laid off radio-promotion employees over the past year, the medium is still important for breaking hits, especially in country and other genres.

According to Wendy Goldberg, an iHeart spokesperson, “very few jobs” have been affected in the 10,000-employee company. She rebuts data that suggests a decline in audience consumption.

“Our broadcast radio audience has more listeners than it did 10 years ago,” she says, citing a Nielsen study that shows 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 next largest digital-radio service.”

“We’ve been 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 layoff by phone Monday a.m. “They assured me it’s not performance-based: ‘There are big cuts across 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 business is “cutting costs wherever they can.” While Jordan is hopeful the “pendulum will swing back a little bit,” Squire says of media cuts: “You see it in radio, you see it in TV, a lot of Hollywood is out of business right now. The entertainment field 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.”