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Audacy Filed For Bankruptcy

spt87 said:
Aggregating them together in one giant corporate blob can streamline a few things, but if they are run in too much of a cookie cutter, corporate way then they lose their competitiveness vs SiriusXM, Spotify, other streaming options which already have that non-localized approach covered.
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That's funny. Running WalMart the "corporate way" hasn't hurt their competitiveness against local retail.

This whole debate about radio consolidation happened 25 years ago. It happened because the FCC wanted to cut back on radio regulations and make government smaller. That's apparently what the public wants.

The size of the radio companies has nothing to do with the bankruptcies. There have been lots of small radio stations that have gone bankrupt recently. A small group in Oregon was just shut down because the owner owed a half a million to a bank. So forcing radio back to the old ownership rules won't prevent bankruptcies.

radioink.com

2024's Arrival Was The End For Five Oregon Coast Radio Stations - Radio Ink

As the clock struck midnight on January 1, Oregon's Yaquina Bay Communications ceased operation, silencing the group's five stations.
radioink.com radioink.com
 
TheBigA said:
That's funny. Running WalMart the "corporate way" hasn't hurt their competitiveness against local retail.

This whole debate about radio consolidation happened 25 years ago. It happened because the FCC wanted to cut back on radio regulations and make government smaller. That's apparently what the public wants.
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Excellent points. We have to remember that the reason why radio ownership was so limited was political. Back in the era of the Federal Radio Commission and then the start of the FCC, powerful politicians did not want large radio groups which could be more powerful than the often hated newspaper chains. So they put tight caps on ownership and very low limits on AM station maximum power.
 
DavidEduardo said:
As I just mentioned, the Clear Channel highly leveraged over-leveraged deal had to go to court to be forced to close when the recession hit. The investment bankers realized what they had commuted to and wanted outd.
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The only wanted out once the recession already started. Prior to that they had no problem betting the bank, so to speak.

DavidEduardo said:
The other big bankruptcy was caused by the lack of leadership competence. Bad management.
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I hear so many excuses, everything except the greed-driven gambling culture that leads to unmanageable debt, time after time.
 
TheBigA said:
It was the Nixon FCC that broke up the broadcasting-newspaper groups. A few survived, but most were broken up because Nixon hated the press. Most of those newspapers are long gone. Mission accomplished.
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I wouldn't say most are gone. I would say that some are. The others are much reduced versions of their prior selves, with much, much less advertising (especially classified advertising) than before. (Less advertising == reduced staffing and curtailed coverage) This was the case even before the pandemic, though the pandemic certainly made things worse. For certain newspapers, it was the final straw.

Nixon was a sideshow. In the 1980s and 1990s, newspapers and TV stations thrived even after cross-ownership relationships were broken up. What were hurt were radio stations, particularly legacy AMs, who wound up without complementary media to prop them up. It hardly matters now; newspapers in particular happily kept on filling their pages with long, boring feature series tailored to rack up journalism prizes, while not understanding that TCP/IP was coming to get them.
 
tbolt909 said:
They tried to stop thinking "small time" when they did the CBS deal. That's what created the debt problem. It didn't just happen. Many people here seem to shill for David Field. His Goldman Sachs experience didn't help him in Radio apparently. If they can't monetize all these great platforms you keep talking about, then it's a competence problem...
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Goldman Sachs teaches you how to invest. It doesn't teach you how to run a company.

Financial "engineers" don't necessarily know how to run companies. Look at Sears...if you can find them.

Yep, Audacy made some bad decisions. But many of those decisions were made by subordinates. A chief executive can't micromanage a company of that size. What Field should be held accountable for is how he is managing his subordinates and handling the public-facing aspects of a publicly traded company. With the company going private, in the control of its debtholders, one of their responsibilities will be to hold Field accountable to their expectations for a chief executive. What Field can be criticized for is having a strategic vision that was lacking, or possibly lacking one altogether; his new bosses will hold him accountable for that, and he will either have to align with their expectations or he will have to go away.
 
TheBigA said:
Which may be why he hasn't signed his employment agreement with them. Its hard to go from part owner to employee. So he may decide it's time to leave.
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Is there an article about his not signing his employment agreement? Maybe he is filling some suitcases with cash and booking a one way trip to Paraguay...
 
DavidEduardo said:
No, those groups thought they could create "State Packages" to sell with coverage of every market or area of the state. Clear Channel's and Randy's Ohio effort was the most developed... it did not work.
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I remember them running "Buckeye Country" with several stations voicetracked out of WCOL, Columbus.
 
TheBigA said:
It was the Nixon FCC that broke up the broadcasting-newspaper groups. A few survived, but most were broken up because Nixon hated the press. Most of those newspapers are long gone. Mission accomplished.
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That is a ruling on cross-ownership, but a very good point as well. I was thinking of the 1930 era limit on 7 stations and 50 kw maximum power rules that kept companies from owning national networks all by themselves and / or populating the dial with high power stations.

The FRC/FCC love for low power was immense, starting with the 6 Class IV 250 watt channels.
 
gr8oldies said:
I remember them running "Buckeye Country" with several stations voicetracked out of WCOL, Columbus.
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Thar was one arm of the octopus they wanted to create, with multiple stations and formats blanketing the state.
 
Mark Roberts said:
Yep, Audacy made some bad decisions. But many of those decisions were made by subordinates. A chief executive can't micromanage a company of that size. What Field should be held accountable for is how he is managing his subordinates and handling the public-facing aspects of a publicly traded company. With the company going private, in the control of its debtholders, one of their responsibilities will be to hold Field accountable to their expectations for a chief executive. What Field can be criticized for is having a strategic vision that was lacking, or possibly lacking one altogether; his new bosses will hold him accountable for that, and he will either have to align with their expectations or he will have to go away.
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There are people - including Field himself and a couple here more locally - who seem to be intent on saying that Audacy was merely the victim of circumstance, and that they didn't make bad decisions at all. It wasn't the decisions...it was the debt! The pandemic. The market conditions. The company was doing everything (or most everything) right, but gosh darn it everything else went bad.

If I had a friend who made a decent living, but bought a house that was at the limit of what he could afford, then bought an expensive car on a long loan with little down, indulged his penchant for expensive watches and hit the casino "just for fun" a couple nights a week (despite all these things being beyond his means), when it came time to pay the piper it would be absurd to say "hey, you did nothing wrong. You were living your best life, and if you go bankrupt, well...God Bless America!"

There were other radio companies that managed to survive the "perfect storm" Field blames for Audacy's woes without going into bankruptcy. Spread the blame beneath Field to his subordinates, but the newly-bankrupt company is the victim of more than just circumstance.
 
Deus Ex Machiato said:
There were other radio companies that managed to survive the "perfect storm" Field blames for Audacy's woes without going into bankruptcy. Spread the blame beneath Field to his subordinates, but the newly-bankrupt company is the victim of more than just circumstance.
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But, of the "biggies", the company previously known as Entercom, was the most recent and was most highly dependent on the "Big AMs" in the purchase portfolio. The pandemic hurt AM the most, as drive-time listening was assassinated and news and talk are much more centered on in-car listening.

So the situation was not comparable. And remember, on of the other big group fails was due to the top management and not the environment... I'm talking about the Dickeys... who did not seem to grasp how to get ratings and how to sell radio. Other than that, they were just perfect.
 
Deus Ex Machiato said:
Spread the blame beneath Field to his subordinates, but the newly-bankrupt company is the victim of more than just circumstance.
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Remember these were the same people who were running a company that had a stock price in the teens when the rest of the industry was in the crapper. They absorbed several big purchases including Lincoln Financial before this. My take is it was a combination of the $2 billion plus a bunch of hidden time bombs left from trying to run a radio division that had been previously owned by a TV network. Citadel and Cumulus each blew up trying to swallow that kind of load. Ther seems to be a pattern.
 
This thread leaves me wondering with all the external forces (reduced radio listenership, pandemic, decreased advertising dollars hitting most if not all media) what David Field could have done to not only be profitable but make enough money to pay down the massive amount of debt Entercom/Audacy has from acquiring CBS. That acquisition and taking on that debt may have been wrong, especially in hindsight, but I’m not sure Field could have done anything with these external factors to generate enough cash on a regular basis to pay down this debt.
 
PrezSquid said:
Listeners (particularly ones who grew up in the 80s-90s) are always negative about stations trying to appeal to generations after them with newer artists. There's always people complaining on say, KROQ socials for example because of "the music they play", "the hosts they got rid of", "being trendy", and its the same stuff that gives me vibes to some 91X listeners on how alt radio should just be the same 90s songs. its annoying
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The elaboration was helpful, very much agree with you. With KROQ, I’m afraid that a lot of the Gen Zers who KROQ would appeal to isn’t looking to radio, at least in my anecdotal experience, for music, and I am sure part of it is that they do not want to keep hearing the same burnt out golds… that said what KITS is doing is worth observing, trying to bridge that gap with a decently wide playlist.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, in New York, there is whining ad-nauseam (at least on here) about WCBS not being an oldies station anymore (technically speaking, it has not been an “oldies” station in over 18 years). The station is now shifting into playing more 90’s and 2000’s hits and to some who remember/grew up with the WCBS of the 80’s and 90’s, that it is sacrilege. All radio formats have to evolve to stay relevant.
 
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