The same week that programmers and air talent were cut across many iHeartMedia markets, reply comments were already in the docket at the FCC arguing that radio’s pattern of layoffs is a case for the status quo when it comes to ownership caps.
The musicFIRST Coalition and Future of Music Coalition filed reply comments in both the FCC’s 2026 Communications Marketplace Report proceeding and the 2022 Quadrennial Review, arguing that recent broadcast layoffs undercut the industry’s push to relax the Local Radio Ownership Rule.
The filing contends that permitting additional station acquisitions would not “reduce commercial loads, restore popular local on-air personalities, improve programming choices, reinstate locally produced content or otherwise address the concerns listeners themselves identify as reasons for spending less time with radio.”
The filing cites how major radio operators have collectively shed hundreds of positions and cancelled programming since 2024, including iHeart, Audacy, Beasley Media Group, Cumulus Media, and CBS, among others. musicFIRST frames those cuts as evidence of what consolidation produces in practice, citing FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez’s belief that local media outlets have been “hollowed out through consolidation, cost cutting and the loss of advertising revenue to digital platforms.”
The filing arrived days before iHeart’s latest round of layoffs, affecting programmers and air talent in dozens of markets. Smaller markets bore the heaviest losses, with Atlantic City, Cedar Rapids, and Spokane among those reported to have lost the majority of their remaining local on-air talent.
The NAB sees the same landscape and draws the opposite conclusion.
In its own filings, the association has argued that ownership limits are the root cause of radio’s decline, pointing to BIA data showing total radio ad revenue fell more than 30% between 2007 and 2025 on a nominal basis. With Borrell Associates projecting that roughly 84% of local digital ad spending will flow to platforms like Google and Meta by 2029, NAB contends that current caps prevent broadcasters from achieving the scale necessary to compete.
Broadcasters filing in the Quadrennial Review have been blunter still, with multiple station groups arguing that the greatest threat to localism is not consolidation but the collapse of local radio itself, a collapse they attribute to competing against tech giants that face no geographic or numerical ownership restrictions whatsoever.
As for musicFIRST and the Future of Music Coalition, the NAB has pushed back directly on the coalitions’ motives. In prior filings, the association argued that the duo opposes ownership reform not out of concern for the public interest, but out of frustration over Congress’s repeated refusal to impose a terrestrial performance royalty on AM/FM airplay.
The NAB, in turn, warns that such a mandate would further jeopardize local jobs and accelerate station closures. The Local Radio Freedom Act, which opposes any new performance fee on broadcast radio, has drawn more than 250 bipartisan cosponsors in the House and Senate. NAB has characterized the performance royalty push as a potential drain on an industry where the majority of stations already earn less than $2.9 million per year in advertising revenue; roughly what the three major international labels that musicFIRST represents generated collectively every hour in 2023.
