Company: IHETW
Filing Date: 2025-02-27
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001400891-25-000009
Chunk: 23

Company: iHeartMedia, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-27
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 23
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 community of license and maintain records demonstrating this responsiveness. Federal law also regulates the broadcast of obscene, indecent or profane material. The FCC has authority to impose fines exceeding $400,000 per utterance with a cap exceeding $4 million for a continuing violation. In June 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on appeals of several FCC indecency actions, but declined to rule on the constitutionality of the FCC’s indecency policies. The FCC has since solicited public comment on those policies in a proceeding which remains pending. In addition, the FCC regulates the conduct of on-air station contests, requiring in general that the material rules and terms of the contest be broadcast periodically or posted online and that the contest be conducted substantially as announced. The FCC also regulates, among other things, political advertising, sponsorship identification, the use of emergency alert system tones and the advertisement of contests and lotteries.

Equal Employment Opportunity

The FCC’s rules require broadcasters to engage in broad equal employment opportunity recruitment efforts, retain data concerning such efforts and report much of this data to the FCC and to the public via periodic reports filed with the FCC or placed in stations’ public files and websites. The FCC periodically audits for compliance with its equal employment opportunity rules and broadcasters can be sanctioned for noncompliance.

Technical Rules

Numerous FCC rules govern the technical operating parameters of radio stations, including permissible operating frequency, power and antenna height and interference protections between stations. Changes to these rules could negatively affect the operation of our stations.

11

Content, Licenses and Royalties

We must pay license fees to copyright owners of musical compositions (typically, songwriters and publishers) for the rights to broadcast and stream musical compositions. Copyright owners of musical compositions most often rely on intermediaries known as performing rights organizations (“PROs”) to negotiate licenses with copyright users for the public performance of their compositions, collect license fees under such licenses and distribute them to copyright owners. We maintain public performance licenses from, and pay license fees to, various PROs including the four major PROs in the U.S., which are the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (“ASCAP”), Broadcast Music, Inc. (“BMI”), SESAC LLC ("SESAC") and Global Music Rights LLC (“GMR”). These licenses periodically come up for renewal, and as a result one or more of our PRO licenses currently are the subject of renewal negotiations. The outcome of these renewal negotiations could impact, and potentially increase, our music license fees. In addition, there is no guarantee