I think it took the buyout of the Citadel stations for it to come to light on a nationwide level. Prior to Cumulus, most Citadel stations still had local air staffs in most dayparts as well as even nights in a lot of cases. When Cumulus got those, and the debt that came with that purchase, the axe started falling hard.
While Cumulus decimated the old Citadel, it wasn't exactly flying below the radar immediately before that deal. When the Great Recession hit, people in the industry noticed the massive bloodletting, even if the average listener might not have. I'm not sure if anybody who was live after 7:00 PM still had a job by Halloween 2008. A few months later, there was another massive round of cuts that took out almost everyone who was on in the midday. People might have had some hope when it acquired Citadel that things might turn around, but that hope was dashed almost immediately.
Cumulus didn't have debt quite the same way we traditionally think of debt. It tended to buy stations by swapping equity rather than paying cash. The Dickeys basically ended up giving their company to outside investors. Most of the debt Cumulus had was money the private equity firms owed themselves. When the company filed bankruptcy, it was trying to force the remaining credit holders to convert their debt into equity, too.
Morning shows were replaced with shows from larger markets, the midday and 7pm-12am shift was automated or became syndicated, weekends became jockless, all overnight shifts were definitely eliminated, etc. Since Cumulus doesn’t have pre-packaged formats and voice trackers like iHeart and even Audacy (to an extent) have, it makes the cuts more obvious when there are just 2 DJ’s listed on the website.
I'm not sure what you mean by "pre-packaged formats and voicetrackers." Cumulus has most of the satellite format business now, and it was using its jocks in multiple markets for several years before it got the satellite operators.
A lot of Cumulus AC’s place John Tesh in the midday slot. I’d rather hear music, but generally they do this because they have to carry Delilah at night, case in point
WPEZ in Macon, GA. It’s rare to see Tesh carried on an iHeart station.
Cumulus only carries Delilah in a handful of markets. I believe WPEZ and Tallahassee are the only ones left that carry her show. It dumped her in Albuquerque not long ago. KMAJ-FM in Topeka got rid of her a couple or three years ago, too, and replaced her with local talent at night. I'm pretty certain he's voicetracked; Majic 107.7 still carries Tesh in middays. Cumulus has been trying to get away from carrying Delilah for quite some time and has replaced her with Tesh in most markets that carried her show. I suspect you don't see iHeart carrying Tesh because it syndicates Delilah. It would probably rather carry its own programming in the 7-midnight slot than get it from someone else. About 15 years ago, Clear Channel aired Tesh in overnights after Delilah on a lot of its stations. When BP/Jones syndicated Delilah prior to July 2004, it pushed its affiliates to carry Dave in the Dark in overnights. After that show went away, Tesh became a quick and easy replacement. AC competitors, however, have been able to pry Tesh away over the years and put him on in better timeslots.
Cumulus was a small fry, especially in large markets, until they bought Susquehanna and Citadel. When Cumulus went public on the NASDAQ in 1998, their largest market was Toledo and their second largest was Ann Arbor. I don't think that small to medium market strategy changed much, until the Susquehana acquisition in 2005-06. According to a 1998 issue of "Radio Business Report" from David's web archives, Cumulus had revenues of $167 million.
Early in its expansion, Cumulus had the strategy of buying bottom feeders on the cheap and moving them to the middle of the pack. It managed to get a few successful clusters, but it generally tried to put struggling operators out of their misery and improve moderately on their operations and margins. Around 20 years ago, it expanded into Kansas City buying a couple of rimshot stations, but, in general, the Susquehanna deal did make it a larger and more noticeable player. I know when it bought the cluster where I worked in '04 the company was showing an operating loss.
Even after the Susquehanna deal, which got them in to some larger markets, Cumulus was pretty hands off and felt more like a smaller operator with a good bit of autonomy at the market level compared to Clear Channel at the time. After the recession of 2008-2009 was when they really started to rule with an iron fist, and it only got worse after they started gearing up to purchase Citadel.
Cumulus was anything but hands-off when it got Susquehanna. It immediately put down its way of operating and got rid of everyone who wouldn't fall in line. It immediately imposed its top-down programming formula on its new stations. What it didn't do was can most of the air staff. That didn't really start until the Great Recession.
The Columbia, SC and Charleston, SC clusters were great. To be sub-75 markets, they still kept local morning shows on all of the stations and were local until midnight pretty much. The AC in Columbia was live 24 hours a day. Cumulus kept that strategy for a short amount of time, not long. Slowly the mid-day and night jocks started disappearing, The Bert Show replaced the long running local morning show in Charleston, etc etc.
Keep in mind, WTCB in Columbia was the LP-1 for that area. The state or local EAS plan may have required it to be attended 24/7. When I left Cumulus, I took a job in state government but was allowed to work part-time at the competitor across the street. My new station was the LP-1, and we had to have someone there at all times. About a month before I ended up getting canned there (along with most of the rest of the weekend staff), we were doing tests to allow the Highway Patrol to start originating the EAS alerts. I knew we weren't long for the world once that happened. The same thing might have happened a few years later in South Carolina.
Of course a lot of these financial problems stemmed from the unfortunately overpriced and depreciating ABC properties which were trouble for Citadel and carried over for Cumulus but the FM’s did provide cash they needed several years ago. If a buyer comes along, I still wouldn’t be surprised to see Cumulus exit DC and LA.
I'm not sure about the rest of DC, but there's little doubt KABC 790 would be sold if a buyer came along.
