iHeartRadio Has Grown To 70M Registered Users

Services like Pandora, Spotify and whatever Apple is working on tend to get most of the headlines, but iHeartRadio says it has been building a big audience of its own — specifically 70 million registered users.

The streaming music service was created by radio giant Clear Channel, which rebranded as iHeartMedia last year. iHeartRadio allows users to listen to live radio stations, as well as creating their own custom stations.

One point of pride: The fact that it only took less than four years (1,361 days, specifically) to reach the 70 million number, which it says is faster than any other streaming music service.  It’s only been six months since iHeartRadio announced that hit 60 million users.

iHeartRadio’s General Manager Owen Grover said one of the big sources of growth has been “eating our own cooking,” namely promoting the app on iHeartMedia’s traditional radio stations. He argued that this illustrates the personal relationship that the company and its on-air personalities have developed with listeners.

“It’s the differentiation of a Google AdWords campaign versus having a trusted personality as part of your routine,” he said.

Of course, a registered user count doesn’t tell you how many people are actually listening on a regular basis. (Spotify, in contrast, says it has more than 60 million monthly active users and 15 million paying subscribers.)

Grover did note that the service is still getting “tens and tens of thousands of new registrations on a daily basis.”

He also pointed out that things works differently for the iHeartRadio app, since you can actually listen to music without registering. You don’t sign up unless you want to use additional features like creating playlists — so iHeartRadio’s reach is potentially much larger than its registered userbase. In fact, the company says the iHeart network reaches 87 million unique visitors each month, while the app has been downloaded more than 600 million times.

You can read more in this company blog post.