courtesy of\u00a0The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>\u2014that radio giants SiriusXM and iHeartMedia might be poking around at the idea of merging into one giant \u201cyou\u2019re trapped in your car and you\u2019ve got to listen to something\u201d company. Nobody involved is going on the record, but\u00a0THR\u00a0quotes 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 \u201cformer CEO of Ticketmaster\u201d Azoff and Apollo \u201cAlmost bought Paramount\u201d Global Management in the mix to facilitate a sale.<\/p>\nIf it happened, this wouldn\u2019t be the first time that Sirius and iHeartMedia\u2014which filed for bankruptcy in 2018, but which emerged from the status in May 2019\u2014have 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 \u201cNo. 1 podcast publisher globally,\u201d with more than a billion downloads per year, and while SiriusXM doesn\u2019t have quite\u00a0that reach, it\u2019s become a pretty major mover and shaker in the medium, too. The two smooshing together might raise serious competition concerns\u2014although those mad hatters who currently manage anti-trust concerns in Washington have seemed increasingly less concerned with that in recent years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019ve been thinking about media consolidation, and also mercury, a lot lately. Gigantic media companies, it seems, really…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-412608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}