How iHeartMedia Is Bringing Podcasts To The Metaverse (And The Metaverse To Podcasts)

Do you wish to take heed to a podcast whereas taking part in a recreation or constructing a world? Take heed to music whereas chatting with pals? Watch your favourite musician drop a brand-new album dwell, or attend a dwell live performance within the metaverse?

If iHeartMedia and Roblox have their manner … you’ll.

iHeartMedia is nearly a stealth contender in podcasting. Spotify, its acquisitions, and its ongoing battle with podcasting OG Apple is just about what you hear within the information. (And sure, that’s partly my fault.) However iHeartMedia is a serious presence in podcasting as effectively — greater than you suppose. A part of that’s leveraging its large footprint in radio — 850 broadcast radio stations — and a part of that’s its ventures in owned and created on-line audio.

“Now we have almost 500 million downloads a month whenever you really matter all of our exhibits,” Conal Byrne, the CEO at iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group, lately informed me. “A stat that I really like is we now have over 50 podcasts that drive over 1 million month-to-month downloads every, and people are throughout 19 or 20 totally different genres. So we’re not a one-trick pony.”

Knowledge on the most important listening platform in podcasting is difficult to return by.

Podcasting instruments supplier Buzzsprout provides widely-cited statistics suggesting that as of June 2022, Apple Podcasts owns virtually 40% of the market, adopted by Spotify at simply over 1 / 4. Different information suggests that Spotify has 32.5 million podcast listeners per thirty days and Apple Podcasts has solely 28.5 million month-to-month listeners.

Edison Analysis, nonetheless, says that about 170 million Individuals listened to what it calls “on-line audio” as of 2020, and the 2 high platforms with model consciousness are Pandora and iHeartRadio, adopted by Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google, and others.

I believe these extra broadly outlined class numbers are extra aligned to Byrne’s, and embody extra conventional radio in addition to podcasts. A 3rd of media client devour is audio, he says, and 75% of that’s broadcast.

In any case, the platform is just not small, and he’s planning to take it new locations. In June iHeart introduced a partnership with State Farm to launch iHeartLand on Roblox to characteristic “dwell experiences combining main album releases, among the largest hit podcasts and interactive gaming.”

The rationale: scale and entry.

“When a brand new platform arises like Roblox with 200 million month-to-month lively customers or Epic’s Fortnite with 100 million month-to-month lively customers … we sit up and take discover,” Byrne says. “That is virtually a mandate inside our firm: to satisfy audiences the place they’re, to not drive them into our app, our platform, to satisfy them midway, meet them the place they’re.”

In different phrases, why not take heed to music or a podcast when you’re taking part in, constructing, or socializing in a 3D interactive world? And why not make new dwell experiences potential irrespective of the place individuals occur to be?

“The thrust of that is persistent superior programming, the place you are feeling like you may come and see dwell podcasts, dwell artists, musicians performing, work together with them in ways in which the metaverse allows you to form of stage up the way you would possibly work together with them in IRL, amidst all of the superior gameplay and interactivity that these platforms are actually good at anyway,” Byrne says.

That’s bringing music and audio to the metaverse. However he’s additionally seeking to deliver the metaverse to music and audio.

The entry level? NFTs.

Byrne is aware of NFTs have a little bit of a nasty rep proper now. The market is depressed and flooded with fly-by-night get-rich-quickers. However he has a barely totally different tackle how NFTs can develop into a part of iHeartMedia’s future success in podcasting. And it’s not what you’re going to suppose it’s.

First off, iHeartMedia doesn’t outline NFTs like web3 doubters would possibly: over-priced JPEGs that needs to be free, that anybody can steal, and that don’t have any actual worth. Somewhat, Byrne sees three elements to NFTs, and it’s far more about creating worth with them than promoting them:

• collectibles (the usual use case)
• group (a extra superior social membership use case)
• content material (constructing tales, exhibits, and full podcasts round characters)

“We considered this concept of buying a collection of NFTs like a Mutant Ape, a CryptoPunk, a World of Ladies, a Loot, a Quirky with the intention of turning these into podcast hosts,” Byrne says. “So we acquired 10 to fifteen NFTs. We put a bunch of wonderful … comedy writers in a author’s room. They constructed again tales for these characters. We introduced in a few of our greatest producers, we introduced in superior voice actors, and we’re respiration life form of actually into these NFT characters as podcast hosts for a slate of exhibits we’ll launch throughout the following 12 months known as the ‘Non-Enjoyable Squad.’”

That’s a reasonably distinctive tackle the NFT alternative. Refreshingly, it doesn’t contain constructing a set of algorithmically-created photographs and promoting them for a whole lot of hundreds of {dollars} to crypto nerds.

And there can be attention-grabbing mashups. What would a present with each a Mutant Ape and a CryptoPunk be like?

“It is Gorillaz for podcasting,” says Byrne.

(Gorillaz, for the uninitiated — which included me — is a digital band with synthetic characters as musicians that has offered over 26 million albums and publishes music movies, interviews, comedian strips, and extra.)

How iHeartMedia’s NFT characters will rip/combine/burn every kind of various materials and insert it into the metaverse stays to be seen, however you may’t fault the creativity or the hassle. It’s an attention-grabbing idea, and one which takes what the corporate does effectively — audio, tales, publishing — and combines it with the place expertise and maybe our tradition goes.

Whether or not it really works or not, time will inform.

However it aligns with the perception that Byrne’s boss Bob Pittman, who based MTV and is now the CEO of iHeartMedia, shared with him:

“[Don’t] assume that you already know what audiences need simply because the information informed you one thing or did not let you know one thing. Knowledge tells you the solutions to the questions you requested, not essentially the solutions you want.”

It appears seemingly that concert events within the metaverse is one thing that can occur. It appears clear that we’ll need leisure in our Prepared Participant One environments identical to we do IRL. However will we wish the digital characters of right this moment — the Bored Apes and the mutant zombies of the NFT world — to kind the characters in our new listening experiences?

I don’t know.

However it’ll be attention-grabbing to search out out.