We’ve been thinking about media consolidation, and also mercury, a lot lately. Gigantic media companies, it seems, really just want to act like a big pile of the silvery stuff, dumped out of a broken thermometer and onto your kitchen table. Which is to say, they’re possessed of an unstoppable inclination to flow together into an even bigger, more toxic blob, regardless of who they have to drive crazy in the process.
This little musing brought to you today by news—courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter—that radio giants SiriusXM and iHeartMedia might be poking around at the idea of merging into one giant “you’re trapped in your car and you’ve got to listen to something” company. Nobody involved is going on the record, but THR quotes sources suggesting the two companies (which, between them, are the largest satellite and broadcast radio companies in the country) might be interested in making a deal, with big-money names like Irving “former CEO of Ticketmaster” Azoff and Apollo “Almost bought Paramount” Global Management in the mix to facilitate a sale.
If it happened, this wouldn’t be the first time that Sirius and iHeartMedia—which filed for bankruptcy in 2018, but which emerged from the status in May 2019—have been in business together; iHeart (or Clear Channel, as it was known at the time) formerly owned a stake in Sirius, which it sold off back in 2013. In the years since, iHeartMedia has shrunk a bit, radio-wise, and currently owns about 850 AM/FM stations across the country, down from the 1,200 that Clear Channel owned at its peak. Which is still massive, if not enough to necessarily serve as a bulwark against the rise of phone-based audio entertainment; both iHeart and SiriusXM have been moving heavily into podcasting in recent years, as radio markets across the country have shrunk. In fact, podcasting might be the spot where the alleged merger might run into the most regulatory trouble, if it actually tries to go through: iHeart bills itself as the “No. 1 podcast publisher globally,” with more than a billion downloads per year, and while SiriusXM doesn’t have quite that reach, it’s become a pretty major mover and shaker in the medium, too. The two smooshing together might raise serious competition concerns—although those mad hatters who currently manage anti-trust concerns in Washington have seemed increasingly less concerned with that in recent years.
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