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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.

Premiere's Bobby Bones will go into the National Radio Hall of Fame in the music format category, Bill Handel in the spoken work category. Bones and Handel were voted in through public voting. Here is the complete list of honorees for 2017...

CBS Radio has been getting a lot of national press the last few days and it has nothing to do with the Entercom merger. One day after her story went viral, Country Artist Lindsay Ell spoke to The Washinton Post about being cancelled by CBS Radio in Sacramento because she's dating Bobby Bones, who's syndicated by iHeartMedia. And CBS Radio is trying to do a little damage control over the incident.

(by Renee Cassis) That was the topic of a lively discussion, Thursday, at the 34th Annual TV & Radio Financial Summit in New York City. There seems to be an expectation that this FCC, under the Chairmanship of Ajit Pai, is headed down the road that leads to less-strict ownership rules and more consolidation. Is that the answer to radio's revenue woes?