Industry News

BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) has a new Vice President of Creative for its Latin arm.

Jesus Gonzalez will join the company as will oversee BMI’s Latin Creative team helping to sign and develop new talent, assist BMI’s family of songwriters and publishers and serve as a liaison between the Latin music community and the industry at large.

Based out of BMI’s Los Angeles office, Gonzalez reports to BMI SVP/Creative Alex Flores.

“Throughout his career, Jesus has forged strong relationships within the Latin music community as a songwriter and a music executive,”  Flores said. “His background gives him a deep understanding for both the artistic and business side of what we do, which is invaluable to our music creators, and his ability to forecast industry trends within the ever-growing Latin music space is second to none. I look forward to working with Jesus on developing new talent and supporting our incredible roster of Latin songwriters, producers, composers and music publishers.”

Prior to joining BMI, Gonzalez spent nearly seven years at Universal Music Group, where he was most recently SVP/Brands & Partnerships.

In that role, he spearheaded major collaborations between top Latin artists and global Fortune 500 companies, developed marketing plans around releases to amplify those partnerships and forecasted industry trends. During his tenure at Universal, he helped secure deals for internationally acclaimed performing songwriters, including J Balvin, Juanes and Luis Fonsi, with top brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi and Mastercard, to name a few.

Other roles include a stint as Vice President of Music Partnerships working with Rogers & Cowan, FRUKT and Octagon under the Interpublic umbrella, and he was the Principal partner at Maleco Music, a music and brand consulting agency.

As a songwriter, he is a voting member of the Recording Academy for the GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY Awards, and was a mentor for the 2020 Adweek Executive Mentor Program. Gonzalez received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of California, Riverside.

“Spurious Emissions.”

It’s something the FCC takes seriously, and will issue a Notice Of Violation for any offense. This week, two notices in one day were issued, and as Wilkinson Barker Knauer attorney David Oxenford notes, both involve low-power radio stations.

It shows that even micro FMs are subject to policing.

Specifically, Oxenford says an FCC Field Office cited Low Power FM operators for using transmission systems that, in addition to transmitting signals on their authorized channels, were also emitting signals on other channels that posed the potential for interference with other users on those other frequencies – sometimes not even broadcast frequencies.

In one case, the FCC noted that it was the FAA that reported the interference.

“All broadcast transmissions have the potential for these spurious emissions on channels other than the ones for which a station is authorized, especially if a station is near other stations as frequencies can interact to produce these unintended emissions,” Oxenford says. “When constructing and operating any broadcast station, care should be given to ensure that these off-channel emissions are not of a signal strength beyond that permitted by the FCC rules as interference can occur and the FCC can potentially impose fines.”

Neither of these NOVs proposes a fine.

Rather, each asks for a response from the operator of the LPFM station and reserves the right to impose a fine depending on the response and any corrective action that is taken, Oxenford says.

It should be noted that the Commission rarely publishes these “routine” NOVs in its Daily Digest. But, it did so with these two notices.

“This publication may be meant as a warning to all stations to ensure that their transmissions are within the permitted limits to avoid any enforcement action, so consider yourself warned!” Oxenford concludes.

A digital low-power TV station serving Florida’s state capital and a sibling LPTV facility located in Auburn, Ala., are being spun.

It’s a Game Day decision. Really. That’s the name of the seller in this transaction.

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RBR+TVBR OBSERVATION

You never know where one can find the freshest ideas that can truly spark a radio station, making it vitally important — and fun — for its listeners.

One successful FM serving Canada’s biggest market has one that every AC, Classic Hits or Rhythmic “Old School” station should consider. Now.

Why? It demands appointment listening, audience engagement and involves something simply gratifying. When’s the last time one of your stations did that?

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In July 2015, a collection of 9 AMs, an FM and an FM translator were sold by what was left of the former Davidson Media Group. The buyer? A licensee controlled by Mark Janbakhsh.

He’s now in divestment mode, and has signed off on the sale of one of those AMs acquired nearly six years ago.

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As RBR+TVBR first reported on February 18, Spanish Broadcasting System (SBS) not only completed its recapitalization effort and closed its previously announced offering of notes due 2026, but settled a court battle regarding its Series B Preferred Stock.

Further details regarding the company’s agreements with Series B shareholders are now known.

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The long-awaited spin of Nielsen Holdings plc‘s sale of what was recently rebranded as NielsenIQ is complete.

The multinational company that is the dominant ratings data and consumer research provider to U.S. TV and radio broadcasting and cable companies has completed its sale of Nielsen IQ — formerly branded as Nielsen’s Global Connect business — to affiliates of Advent International, in partnership with James “Jim” Peck.

In making the announcement, Nielsen CEO David Kenny thanked the NielsenIQ team “for their invaluable commitment and contributions over the years,” while acknowledging that, even after the spin-off, a “strong working relationship” is anticipated.

Speaking of the post-spin Nielsen, Kenny continued, “This is a transformative time for Nielsen. We have redesigned our products, our business platform, and our operating model, positioning Nielsen to better deliver the solutions our clients need in the rapidly changing global media ecosystem. We are now fully aligned around three essential solutions —Audience Measurement, Audience Outcomes and Gracenote Content Services — that are designed to drive growth by leveraging a single media platform across a global digital-first footprint.”

Nielsen Holdings on November 1 announced that it had signed a definitive agreement under which affiliates of Advent International, one of the largest global private equity investors, in partnership with former TransUnion CEO Peck, will acquire the Nielsen Global Connect business for $2.7 billion.

The agreed-to price is subject to working capital, cash, debt-like items and other customary adjustments.

Nielsen also received warrants in the new company exercisable in certain circumstances.

David Rawlinson will remain CEO of NielsenIQ.

The deal’s closing comes just days after Nielsen and Roku announced a new strategic alliance that the companies believe will help shape the future of media and TV measurement.

Advisors
J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Guggenheim Securities, LLC are acting as financial advisors to Nielsen, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Clifford Chance LLP, DLA Piper, and Baker McKenzie are serving as legal advisors to Nielsen. Ropes & Gray LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP are serving as legal counsel to Advent and BofA Securities is serving as lead financial advisor, with Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., RBC Capital Markets and UBS Investment Bank also advising. Financing for the transaction is being arranged and provided by Bank of America, UBS Investment Bank, Barclays, Deutsche Bank AG New York, HSBC, RBC Capital Markets, MUFG and Wells Fargo.

More listening is being done on mobile devices than ever before.

According to new research by Edison Research as part of its Share of Ear report, 30% of all audio listening in the U.S. is now being done on a mobile device by those aged 13 and older. This is an increase of 67% since 2014 when Edison began tracking audio consumption among Americans.

While listening to traditional AM/FM radio still accounts for the largest share of audio consumed, the gap between traditional radio and mobile devices is closing. In 2014, 31 percentage points separated the two; in 2021 the two are only separated by two percentage points.

[Read: Share of Listening to Podcasting Hits All-Time High]

Among younger age groups, audio consumption through mobile devices has already surpassed traditional radio receivers. Among those aged 13 to 34, 46% of total daily audio consumption is done on a mobile device while 20% is done on a traditional AM/FM radio receiver.

One potential reason: the coronavirus pandemic caused many Americans to spend more time consuming audio at home in 2020 and less time consuming in-car audio, which has been the prime location for listening to a traditional AM/FM receiver.

“Mobile devices, particularly of course the phone, have been gaining on the traditional radio receiver as the primary listening device for as long as we have been measuring Share of Ear, but with the disruptions of the last year the gap has narrowed dramatically,” said Edison Research President Larry Rosin. “As fewer people have a standard radio receiver in their homes these days, naturally more listening comes through digital devices.”

Edison noted that these statistics speak to the device only, not the audio product being delivered by the device. This is important to clarify because mobile devices can deliver a wide range of audio products, including radio station programming, the report said.

Edison plans to conduct additional data analysis later this year to see if these audio habits remain in a post-quarantine world.

The Share of Ear study is released quarterly and is designed to be a nationally representative study of Americans aged 13 and older to measure their time spent listening to audio sources. The research study asks respondents to complete a 24-hour diary of their audio listening on an assigned day with diaries completed both online and by mail.

The post Growing Percentage of Audio Listening Now Happens on Mobile appeared first on Radio World.

The author is co-host of the syndicated “Under the Hood” radio show.

The car-centric talk show I am a co-host for, “Under The Hood,” had been using the studios of Midwest Communications for over 20 years.

The studios were good but we wanted to have our own home with custom features. A place to hang the collected memories of 30 years on the wall and grow with a full video system installed for broadcast to social media and a possible local TV network.

The scope of the project was a complete ground-up build of a new studio beginning with an empty room.

The show operates on a limited budget like many radio pioneers have had to deal with and so you have to improvise. This meant doing the work in-house. Our team consists of the three hosts and a producer, without an on-staff engineer. I happened have a background in pro sound electronics as well as automotive so I became the point man and had to familiarize myself with what it takes to build a modern radio/podcast/video studio.

The new studios are located in rural Garretson, S.D., amongst the cows and corn some 15 miles from Sioux Falls, S.D. in the nationally-known Nordstrom’s Auto Recycling complex. The massive facility was built in 2019 with a dedicated 800 square-foot upper room sound-insulated for the purpose of a radio studio.

The studio is based around an Audioarts Lightning 16-channel console fed by Electro-Voice RE20 microphones running through a Symetrix Jupiter 8 processor.

Calls are handled using a Backbone Networks IP phone software system. It’s the same company that provided the LUCI software we use. It has worked very well for us.

The microphone booms are all Compass from Blue. They have integrated tally lights for the talent.

We use Denon DN-300RMKII rack-mounted solid-state media recorders to capture the audio for later use on podcast and the live signal is sent through a Barix Exstreamer 500 to the live stations.

Fully automated video switching is provided by way of a Insoft HDVMixer. This system is a hands-off voice activated switching system which allows us to stream to most any social media channel. Cameras are AViPAS 1080P installed in six positions.

LED accent lighting is installed behind the wall sound panels and Neewer 660 fixtures provide the video lighting.

Since we are a call-in car talk show we wanted the caller’s sound to be as clean as possible and ran the caller’s audio through the Jupiter processor. This allows us to get an automatic clean-up and level on the incoming calls.

We broadcast to over 240 stations and do a podcast but the streaming is important to. We had a challenge getting the audio on the stream to the level we wanted and, in the end, we found our solution by running the audio from the board out through the processor before it feeds the stream and that did the trick.

“Under The Hood” has been on the air for over 30 years, 19 with the current hosts. We look to have a good run of at least 20 more years before we hang it up, if ever. We are always actively looking for new markets to air the show to continue to provide free automotive advice to listeners as well as provide a solid platform for stations to place automotive advertisers on.

The post Going Under the Hood at the “Under the Hood” Show appeared first on Radio World.

Tech stocks paced a wave of declines on Wall Street Wednesday, as the Chair of the Federal Reserve declined to say whether or not the Central Bank will work to put a kibosh on inflationary pressure.

Media stocks were caught up in the dips.

Among the bigger decliners is Salem Media Group, down 34 cents to $2.47 after the company posted lower Q4 2020 adjusted EBITDA.

Also off sharply: Beasley Broadcast Group and iHeartMedia.