Bob Pittman Takes A Swipe At Pandora

Bob Pittman got an opportuntiy to promote radio and the compnay he works for these days, Clear Channel, to readers of the Los Angeles Times over the weekend. Pittman who calls New York home these days said when asked how radio was doing in this new Digital age said “The perception out there is that radio is somehow in trouble. The reality is that we have the same percentage of the population listening to radio, at 93%, as we did in 1970 when it was 92%. It’s not declining. Clear Channel reaches 237 million listeners a month, and that doesn’t include our online listeners.”

He also took the time to put Pandora in it’s place saying ” Pandora is not really radio in that it’s not curated. It’s more like a playlist that you put on shuffle. They don’t have local information or local personalities. That said, Pandora is a nice feature. When I was at AOL, we had Instant Messenger. It was a nice feature, too. But it remains to be seen whether Pandora can be a free-standing business model.” However he did admit that Clear Channel plans to allow users of iHeart Radio to  build custom radio stations just like they do with Pandora sometime this summer.

You can read the full interview here thanks to the LA Times.

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