CC's Pittman Plays Up Traditional Radio's Stability

Bob Pittman made a personal, minority investment of $5 million in Clear Channel in November, when he took on an executive role at the privately owned San Antonio-based company. In a recent interview with The LA Times, Pittman talked about what he's doing to bring the traditional radio company into the digital age, online radio and whether he thinks Pandora Media Inc. is a threat.

How is traditional radio doing in the digital age?

The perception out there is that radio is somehow in trouble. The reality is that we have the same percentage of the population listening to radio, at 93%, as we did in 1970 when it was 92%. It's not declining. Clear Channel reaches 237 million listeners a month, and that doesn't include our online listeners.

What do you think of Pandora, Slacker and all the online radio stations that are grabbing so many ears these days?

Pandora is not really radio in that it's not curated. It's more like a playlist that you put on shuffle. They don't have local information or local personalities. That said, Pandora is a nice feature. When I was at AOL, we had Instant Messenger. It was a nice feature, too. But it remains to be seen whether Pandora can be a free-standing business model.

So, what's it going to take to make money online?

The problem is that advertising comes slowly to any new medium or product. When I was at MTV, we projected $10 million in ad revenue for the first year. We did $500,000 and almost went out of business. Coca-Cola did not advertise with us for the first five years. That's how slow advertisers are to warm up to new media. It was the same thing at AOL. But over time, it will grow.

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