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

Do you need to take heed to a podcast whereas enjoying a sport or constructing a world? Take heed to music whereas chatting with buddies? 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 method … 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 significant presence in podcasting as effectively — greater than you assume. 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 actually matter all of our exhibits,” Conal Byrne, the CEO at iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group, not too long ago informed me. “A stat that I really like is now we have over 50 podcasts that drive over 1 million month-to-month downloads every, and people are throughout 19 or 20 completely different genres. So we’re not a one-trick pony.”

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

Podcasting instruments supplier Buzzsprout gives 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 monthly 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 shopper devour is audio, he says, and 75% of that’s broadcast.

In any case, the platform isn’t 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, a few of 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 fulfill audiences the place they’re, to not power them into our app, our platform, to fulfill them midway, meet them the place they’re.”

In different phrases, why not take heed to music or a podcast when you’re enjoying, constructing, or socializing in a 3D interactive world? And why not make new dwell experiences attainable regardless of the place folks occur to be?

“The thrust of that is persistent superior programming, the place you’re feeling like you possibly can come and see dwell podcasts, dwell artists, musicians performing, work together with them in ways in which the metaverse permits you to type of degree up the way you may 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 carry 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 completely different tackle how NFTs can grow to be a part of iHeartMedia’s future success in podcasting. And it’s not what you’re going to assume it’s.

First off, iHeartMedia doesn’t outline NFTs like web3 doubters may: over-priced JPEGs that must be free, that anybody can steal, and that don’t have any actual worth. Reasonably, Byrne sees three features to NFTs, and it’s rather more about creating worth with them than promoting them:

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

“We considered this concept of buying a sequence 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 fantastic … 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 respiratory life type of actually into these NFT characters as podcast hosts for a slate of exhibits we are going to 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 tons of of 1000’s of {dollars} to crypto nerds.

And there might 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 all types of various materials and insert it into the metaverse stays to be seen, however you possibly can’t fault the creativity or the trouble. It’s an attention-grabbing idea, and one which takes what the corporate does effectively — audio, tales, publishing — and combines it with the place know-how and maybe our tradition goes.

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

But it surely 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 inform you one thing. Knowledge tells you the solutions to the questions you requested, not essentially the solutions you want.”

It appears probably that live shows within the metaverse is one thing that may occur. It appears clear that we’ll need leisure in our Prepared Participant One environments similar to we do IRL. However will we would like the digital characters of immediately — the Bored Apes and the mutant zombies of the NFT world — to type the characters in our new listening experiences?

I do not know.

But it surely’ll be attention-grabbing to seek out out.