News

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is reporting that former syndicated radio host Art Bell died of an accidental overdose from a cocktail of prescription drugs. Bell died April 13. He was 72. The coroner’s office, according to the paper, determined Bell had four prescription drugs in his system: oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, and a muscle-relaxant.

Ready for a major Country radio event? Registration for the 50th Anniversary year of Country Radio Seminar begins August 15, with an early bird rate of $499 that will only be available on the opening day. The price will increase to $549 the very next day.

Produced for the last 23 years by Steve Reynolds, Today’s Rock Facts provides comprehensive music news to Active Rock and Mainstream Rock stations, as well as Classic Rock stations. Originally delivered to stations via fax, the service is now offered on a new Web platform.

In November of last year, Dave Beasing launched his new company called Sound That Brands which focuses on creating great content. Today you are more likely to see Beasing at a podcasting conference than you are at a radio conference. That appears to be where a lot of the new and compelling content is coming from.

On Tuesday the company filed its financials with the SEC for the second quarter of 2018. The company reported revenue of $853.3 million for iHeartMedia, down 3.5% from 2017 ($884.4 million) and total revenue of $1.6 billion, down less than 1% from a year ago ($1.59 billion).

Pandora reported 71.4 million active users for the second quarter of 2018. That's down from 72.3 million in the first quarter of 2018 and down significantly from a year ago when active users were 76 million. Listener hours in Q2 of 2018 were 5 billion, flat when compared to Q1 of this year, and down from one year ago when listener hours were 5.22 billion.

SoundExchange says it distributed $208.7 million in sound recording performance royalties in the second quarter of 2018. That's an increase of 17.5% over 2017 ($177.6 million). The company paid that money out to 28,065 performers, an increase of 9% over 2017 (25,681). So far in 2018 SoundExchange has paid out nearly $399 million in royalties.

Carson Cooper was the voice of Public Media's WUSF in the morning in Tampa Bay. He also was part of the creation of WUSF’s public affairs show, “Florida Matters,” serving as its first host. And since 1999 Cooper was a host and programmer of Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville on SiriusXM. Cooper was 58.

Pandora's audio inventory is now generally available for programmatic buying. Audio joins Pandora’s existing display and video solutions available for purchase programmatically. Pandora claims it owns the largest inventory of digital audio content in the U.S., and 92% of its audience is ad-supported — more than double the size of its competition.

The board of directors of the New York State Broadcasters Association has announced its Hall of Fame Class of 2018. The class will be inducted at the New York Leadership and Hall of Fame Luncheon during the NAB Show NY. The luncheon will take place at 12 noon on Thursday, October 18 at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC.