It’s a cross-platform content distribution and promotion deal that combines the audience of Yahoo! Media Network (167 million monthly online users in the US) and Clear Channel Media and Entertainment’s 237 million monthly US listeners across 150 markets–plus their websites and the audience of iHeartRadio.
iHeartRadio will now become Yahoo!’s premier digital radio service. Yahoo! and Clear Channel content will be cross-promoted on iHeartRadio.com, local radio station websites, and the entire Yahoo! Media Network–including Yahoo!’s leading entertainment sites Music, Movies and omg!.
As Yahoo!’s premier digital radio service, iHeartRadio will now include Yahoo!’s original video programs in audio versions through Clear Channel as part of the content promotion. Yahoo! will become Clear Channel’s exclusive web and mobile partner for live concert series, including this year’s iHeartRadio Music Festival, which takes place 9/21 and 9/22 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The two-day festival will feature Yahoo! as the official exclusive web and mobile live webcast partner via a live webcast from cities across the U.S.
Yahoo! and Clear Channel will also collaborate on nearly a dozen additional events annually where Yahoo! will be the exclusive live broadcast partner of the event. Clear Channel will lead all selling of sponsorships around the iHeartRadio Music Festival and live streaming opportunities.
RBR-TVBR observation: Some of us also remember a colossal goof that Yahoo pulled in buying Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com (formerly Audionet) for $5.7 billion in 1999. What a waste of money that was. Over the next few years Yahoo! split the services previously offered by Broadcast.com (it was called Yahoo! Broadcast for a while) into separate services, Yahoo! Launchcast for music and Yahoo! Platinum for video entertainment. Yahoo! Platinum has since been discontinued, its functionality being offered as part of two pay services, AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet and Yahoo! Plus. As of May 2011, neither broadcast.com nor broadcast.yahoo.com both simply redirect to yahoo.com.
As well, it could be a case of “the more the merrier,” but there may be a bit of a conflict between iHeartRadio and Yahoo!’s recent deal with Spotify. They partnered up on a new content distribution deal that will integrate the streaming music service into Yahoo’s Media Network — a suite of websites that reach “nearly” 700 million unique visitors monthly. Spotify’s play widget will debut on Yahoo Music before being rolled out to other properties such as Yahoo Movies and omg! in the coming months. Like iHeartRadio, Spotify offers a music discovery service that lets listeners generate an unlimited number of formats or radio stations based on songs, albums and artists.
