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This is the most important event of the year....if you want your 2018 to be a success that is. Forecast 2018 is only 48 hours away. If you're attending, you'll be hearing from, and rubbing elbows with, the smartest minds who'll be sharing all of their knowledge to make 2018 your best year ever. Here's exactly who will be in attendance at The Harvard Club in New York City Wednesday.

This one is not going to go over well with many of you. In fact, it might even make you angry. FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told her version of the story about the small community of Minot before voting against eliminating the Main Studio Rule on Tuesday. And her opinion was radio failed that local community.

Entercom is divesting three stations to Educational Media Foundation. They are: KSWD-FM 100.3 The Sound in Los Angeles, KSOQ-FM 92.1 in San Diego, and WGGI-FM 95.9 in Wilkes-Barre. The deal is the first of what will probably be several spin-offs to allow Entercom to complete its merger with CBS in order to stay under FCC caps in several markets.

Eric Mastel is the Market Manager for Cumulus in Savannah. He's also one of Radio Ink's Best Managers for 2017. Mastel got his first job in radio as an AE, got handed the phone book and some cassettes called, “tiger tapes”, 33 years ago. His first managers position was GSM for WKFM in Syracuse in 1987.

It's a project he's been working on for years and now WBEB Philadelphia Chairman Jerry Lee is making his Advertising Effectiveness Program free for Philadelphia advertisers that spend $12,000 or more a year in radio. Hershey Entertainment and NRG Energy have already taken advantage of the program. The idea is to help radio advertisers create commercials that produce results.

Those are the words of iHeartMedia CFO Richard Bressler. And behind those words are iHeart's 850-plus radio stations in 170 markets, some of the biggest syndicated names in the business, gigantic festivals and concerts, iHeartRadio, a billboard company, Katz, and Premiere. Bressler says only Google and Facebook are bigger.

Under Ajit Pai's FCC many CEO's in the radio industry believe more consolidation could be on the way for the radio industry. The argument being that radio needs consolidation so it can compete on an even playing field with the likes of Facebook and Google who are mostly unregulated. The flip side of that argument is...

The radio industry's top leaders do not just fall into their positions of leadership. They work harder, they work smarter, and they find ways to put themselves into positions to advance their careers. We turned to four of radio's top leaders and asked them exactly how they do it. Why are they the ones leading people? What did they do to educate themselves? Here's what they had to say.

The Radio Music License Committee has filed a motion, it says, to protect radio stations across the nation, and specifically in Pennsylvania, against Irving Azoff's Global Music Rights. The RMLC filed an antitrust lawsuit in the federal court in Philadelphia, last year against the music licensing organization, based on GMR’s "attempt to require commercial radio stations to pay prices for music performance licenses that are unfairly high and anticompetitive." This injunction is radio's latest move in its fight against Azoff.

According to estimates from Kagan, the biggest radio deal of the second quarter of 2017 was the $82.8 million sale of hip-hop FM station KPWR-Los Angeles from Emmis to Meruelo Media. The transaction was the largest single radio-station sale since 2012 and represents nearly 34% of the quarter’s $245.0 million radio deal total.