TuneIn tunes away from podcasting amid mass layoffs
In December 2009, I visited Bill Moore, in an industrial estate north of Dallas TX. Bill was the founder of TuneIn - known at the time as RadioTime, a platform to “organise the world’s radio”. In his modest office, Bill showed me a mysterious pyramid-shaped device, connected to his computer - the RadioTime USB FM tuner, which would interact with RadioTime software on your PC to give you more information about what you were listening to.
I moderated a session about “tuners and directories” at RAIN Summit West in Las Vegas on April 11, 2011, where Bill was on the panel. In 2010, TuneIn had raised $6mn. The company went on to raise a further $16mn in 2012 and $25mn in 2013. It kept raising money - with twelve rounds, the last in November 2020, when the company was sold to an investment consortium called Innovation Endeavors. Bill Moore ceased being a board member at that point (along with the company’s then-CEO, Juliette Morris).
TuneIn is the de-facto radio database for devices like Apple Music and Siri, and smart speakers from Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, Roku, Bose, Sonos, B&O. Tesla, Volvo, Mercedes Benz, GM, Ford, and Land Rover are among the auto manufacturers who have integrated TuneIn into their cars.
Tesla’s latest update, released on Dec 4, contains a brand new TuneIn Radio feature, promising “over 100,000 music, sports, news & talk radio stations, along with 3 million podcasts, audiobooks, and more.”
A story of success, you’d think. It would seem not.
Layoffs in search of profit
The company appears to have never made money. Juliette Morris notes her successes at the company in 2019-2020 as having “reduced operating loss”; and one of the ways she appears to have done that is to reduce headcount.
LinkedIn is littered with evidence of senior employees having left TuneIn in 2020. Head of Music Partnerships & Branded Content, Charles Raggio, left in March 2020. Senior Vice President & General Manager, Tony Archibong and Senior Vice President, Head of Global Ad Revenue and Partnerships Billy Hartman, left in May 2020. Head of Technology, Andrew Mochalskyy and International Content Partner Manager, Megan Bradshaw, left in July 2020, along with VP, Head of Product Design, Brand & Creative Studio, Geoff Dowd.
But that wasn’t the end of the headcount reductions. In September 2023, around 30 people were suddenly laid-off, including Chief Industry Evangelist Andrew Bock and many long-term engineers. Others also left the company at the same time, including VP & GM, On Demand, Mike Chambers.
They have since had a further two rounds of layoffs, including VP of Operations Mark Verone in March, and Michelle Robinson, the lead of Customer Support, let go after more than thirteen years as part of other layoffs in August.
None of these rounds of job losses have been reported until today.
A broken service
The company trades on its ability to offer an accurate database of radio and podcasts. Yet aggressive cost-cutting is damaging this mission.
In February 2024, the “submit a podcast” form was removed from the website, with a note saying that it would come back shortly but giving creators no further information. In December 2024, that form is still unavailable.
Earlier this month, I contacted Richard Stern, the current CEO, to ask when it might return. He kicked my press enquiry to customer support, who responded with the same boilerplate comment. After I reproduced the response, Stern blocked me from LinkedIn, for the apparent crime of reproducing a boilerplate response from the support team.
I’ve since contacted others at the company, including their PR company; but they haven’t responded at all for comment.
TuneIn’s company strategy is focused on accurate data from creators. But they don’t have any way for podcasters to give this accurate data - and haven’t for ten months.
It’s not just podcasts that are suffering from TuneIn’s cuts. Radio companies tell Podnews that they, too, have had difficulties dealing with the company. Two years ago, one operator tells us, TuneIn wasn’t accepting any new streams for radio stations. “We stopped promoting them when they changed the URL of our stream to some other stream,” another station told us. Another tells us that they’ve been unable to register their station with TuneIn despite months of trying.
Not good for anyone
The company seems to have fallen foul of the typical strategy for venture-capital takeovers: in an attempt to give some return for investors, cutting staffing levels so low it actively harms the business.
There have been more than 173,000 new podcasts this year: but, TuneIn is unlikely to list many of them. This is bad for the industry, bad for TuneIn, and bad for TuneIn’s customers. The company is no longer organising the world’s audio if it fails to maintain its catalogue.
To not even bother to communicate with creators is a failure of the company’s purpose.
- Companies looking for an alternative to TuneIn’s outdated catalogue can use the Podcast Index, which has a fully downloadable database and an API.
