iHM's Bob Pittman: The Sky Is The Limit For Podcasts

“I think the sky’s the limit for podcasting,” iHeartMedia CEO Pittman said Thursday evening at the Podcast Movement Evolutions conference in Los Angeles, David Bloom writes for Forbes. “As an industry, we need to keep investing in it so it can reach its full potential.”

Despite his own bullish take on podcasting, Pittman acknowledged that, “It’s hard to tell what’s going to be big. My job as CEO is to figure out where we’re going to make our big bets. Our strategy is to be where our listeners are, with products and experiences that they’d expect from us.”

Bob Pittman

iHM made its own bet on podcasting in late 2018, acquiring Stuff Media for a reported $55 million, and installed its CEO, Conal Byrne, as head of the rechristened iHeart Podcast Network.

Byrne joined Pittman onstage at the conference Thursday evening before several hundred industry insiders and aspirants. Their conversation came amid a particularly ebullient few days in the suddenly burgeoning 15-year-old podcasting sector.

Nielsen’s recent Streaming Wars report suggests that a significant opportunity exists for more audio, especially subscription audio. Already, nearly two thirds of those whom Nielsen surveyed have at least one streaming audio subscription (a number that’s even higher in younger demographics), and more than half said they pay for two audio subscriptions.

Those subscriptions are likely not just about music, given that all the big services have most of the same 60 million licensed tracks. Podcasts create the potential for unique and exclusive content outside of music’s limited licensing opportunities.

Streaming audio differs significantly from streaming video in one key way, Nielsen noted. More people expect it to be free, thanks to a century of listening to ad-supported free radio broadcasts.

Pittman said 92 percent of Americans listen to broadcast radio at least once a week. Add in the streaming music services, audiobook services and podcasts, nearly everybody is listening to audio in one form or another.

The market for podcasts is “anyone with ears,” Pittman said. “The consumer has really run out of time with their eyes. Audio is the beneficiary of all this.”