Headlines

The Mentoring and Inspiring Women in Radio group, BMI and the RAB have announced that the 13th annual Rising Through the Ranks program will be brought back in 2021 as a virtual event.

The latest revenue data from BIA Advisory Services details just how serious the damage was to radio from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The industry took a big hit last year due to businesses being forced to close, governments locking down and advertising coming to a near stand-still.

Not surprisingly, station transactions were also down during the year of the pandemic. BIA's latest data shows radio station sales fell to levels that hadn’t been seen in years. Only 534 stations sold in 2020 for an estimated value of $139 million. By comparison back in 2011 over 1,000 stations sold for $1.1 billion.

Shopper intelligence data company Catalina and iHeartMedia are teaming up to measure the impact podcast advertising has on offline sales in physical stores. Here's how they plan to accomplish that.

Marketron has launched Aspire by Marketron, a new website for salespeople that includes educational webinars, case studies and creative assets, covering the latest selling techniques and trends.

ViacomCBS is expanding its’ podcast footprint. More than 20 podcasts covering comedy, news, true crime, sports, kids, entertainment, and music; will premiere in 2021.

The City of Richmond has chosen Urban One and Maryland Developer The Cordish Companies as the two finalists to build a new casino. Bally's has been eliminated from consideration. Urban One CEO Alfred Liggins said a final decision will be made by the end of May or early June.

Urban One reported first quarter results Wednesday and with its core radio ad business down 13.7%, CEO Alfred Liggins said he was pretty happy with the company's performance and he sees significant rebound activity in Q2 for Urban One's radio business.

In the early 2000s, Adam Curry (along with software developer Dave Winer) invented podcasting. Today Curry is reinventing podcasting with a new open-source platform called Podcasting 2.0, a collection of open technologies designed to enhance the RSS podcasting ecosystem.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's U.S. Podcast Advertising Revenue Study, podcast advertising will grow as much in the next two years as it did in the past decade. Driven by a strong Q4 in 2020 (+37%), podcast ad revenues climbed to $842 million in 2020, up from $708 million in 2019.