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Are there any FM's for sale?
- Thread starter danjache
- Start date
danjache said:
Every one of them. Make an offer. If the price is right, it's yours.
R
Radio-X
Guest
BossRadioDJ said:
Momma always said "If the price is right, EVERYTHING is for sale!" ;D
In all seriousness, I hope you have at least $10m in financing to purchase some sort of FM signal! Now, if you can find 20 other people with $500k+ to pony up thats the way to do it. But do you have enough experience or financial stability to convince these folks to drop cash on what is commonly considered "a dying medium"?
Radio-X
The two FM's in the Aloha Trust in San Jose; KUFX and KSJO
Did the station thing with 20 partners. No, they didn't try to program it. All were bought out, and now there are 4 partners and 4 stations. It can work....but you had better have access to an 8 figure bankroll to do a deal for a small SF signal. One of the top ones will be WELL north of 100 million.
Prais said:
Big partnerships are done all the time. You have limited partners and you have a general partner. The general partner is responsible for the day to day operation, and is often installed as the CEO. The limited partners are silent, though they can vote on whether to oust the general partner if they don't like their return on investment or other factors regarding running of the business.
In fact, most of the biggest real estate investments in the world are partnerships of hundreds of partners.
Only a neophyte with no investment experience would be concerned with the kind of music a station plays. Commercial radio is not about the programming; it's about the advertising.
DavidKaye said:
You have put your finger on one of the big tensions of the world of business.
Only a neophyte with no investment experience would be concerned with style and quality of automobiles made by a manufacturer. The car business is not about style and quality of automobiels; it's about the selling of cars.
Only a neophyte with no investment experience would be concerned with display and placement of merchandise in a retail store. The retail business is not about merchandising and display; it's about just ringing the cash register.
Only a neophyte with no investment experience would be concerned with cleanliness and patient care of a nursing home that he owned. The nursing home business is not about patient care; it's about collecting the Medicare and Medicaid payments.
Your advice is well taken for investors of the "hedge fund class" who are going to put multi-million dollars deals for a group of substantial stations on the line. Hire a pro to do the programming and hold him/her accountable.
The advice from Prais comes from the world of small market radio, mom-and-pop stations where the investors you gather are not likely to be savvy big-bucks guys. If you go back to the original post, pull up the profile of the poster, and read through his previous posts, you soon recognize that we are conversing about a question posed by a young person, or a person young in experience, someone whose experience level resulting in him posting that one of his current ambitions is to learn how to use Adobe Audition and other comparable software.
If this young man rounds up twenty investors, they will not be Wall Street investors who understand the fine points of Limited Partnerships. At least for his first purchase, he will round up relatives, old school mates and a few frumpy examples of amateur investors.
If you will read just below the surface in what many of us have said to him and you refine the crude oil buried in those messages, the finished product flowing out of your refinery will say: "Honey, yo' furst stayshun ain't gonna be San Francisco."
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
It's clear that you don't understand commercial broadcasting. In the 3 examples I read that you cited, you properly cited what the company is selling: automobiles, retail goods, and patient care. But what you FAIL TO UNDERSTAND is that a radio station is not selling music. It is not selling talkshow hosts. It is not selling news. IT IS SELLING ADVERTISING. The programming exists solely to get people to listen to the station.
Using auto manufacturing as an example, concern about what format a station has is equal to what color flags and banners are flown at a car dealership. The flags and hoopla are there solely to get customers onto the dealer's lot.
Using the retail store as an example, concern about a station's format is equal to being concerned about whether people come into the retail store via a newspaper ad or via a sign on the sidewalk. Sure, the GENERAL PARTNER or CEO is concerned about this, but the people putting the investment money into the company couldn't (and shouldn't) care less about how the customers got there, as long as they got there and the company makes money.
In YOUR WORLD it's about the music, the format, whatever. Fine. That's not commercial radio, that's non-commercial radio, from 88.1 to 91.9 MHz. Non-comm is a whole different animal.
In your world it's about Sirius and XM, Muzak and DMX -- subscription services where they listener pays directly for the kind of content they want to hear. Your energies should be spent THERE because those kinds of services are about the music.
Here's an attempt at clarity....the radio station IS selling music or talk or whatever programming! That is crucial to their survival! Radio is somewhat unique as a business type in this respect. You have to sell the listeners on your programming (product) in order to get them to continue listening and hopefully to grow your listenership (especially the 25-54 demo). You then SELL commercials to the advertisers, who want to reach those listeners in order to get them to buy their goods or services. Most businesses don't have two separate sets of customers, one of which you provide a product to for free, and the other that is charged for access to the first.
Goat is correct, I am young and just getting started in this biz. I didn't post the question because I am in the market to purchase a station, I'm having a hard time paying my student loans, I just put it out there after reading how KTRB AM is up for sale. I haven't heard of a situation like that before, so I was just curious if that would happen on the FM side. But hey, if any of you can get the 20 people to put up$500,000 each, I hope you will hire me 
DavidKaye said:
If you wish to engage in meaningful debate, it helps in face to face discussion to listen to what your opponent said. In a computer forum, it helps if you slow down and read what the other party actually wrote.
I did NOT discuss programming. Nowhere in that post that you responded to did I talk about MUSIC on the radio.
What I did discuss was the method of finance and the method of management employed when sophisticated investors buy a $20 Million or $50 Million or $100 million dollar broadcast enterprise as contrasted to the method of finance and the method of management employed when a first time buyer buys a radio station for $62,000 or $175,000 or maybe $350,000 dollars.
Now. If you DO want to talk about programming for a moment, pull up my profile and read back through 300, 400 may 600 posts I have written. You will see that I have a bias for little radio station, rural radio stations, Mom-and-pop radio stations. And you will also come to realize that I am NOT a believer that the programming of music makes such a radio station survive and be profitable.
In the last year I took a look at my birth certificate, the health of this delightful person I live with, and came to the realization my biological clock has pretty well run out. I am just too damned old to sell my house and move to East Seedtick, OK and prove to the world how good and smart I am about the radio business.
About a year ago I got out the broom and swept out of my brain the prejudices about LPFM and NCE stations because where I currently live and where I need to stay for medical care reasons makes that the only choice I currently have to re-enter the world of broadcasting. And if you should decide to waste an afternoon reading my posts, you will see that I am NOT a big champion on music programming on an LPFM. Music to me is like the grout I would put between the flagstones if I were building a new patio. The stones and their pattern make the patio. The grout (read music here) just fills the dead space between segments of REAL programming.
I left the broadcasting business a number of years ago so my children would not keep having to move from school to school to school. So what did I do when I was no longer going to work at a radio station. I worked in the world of providing healthcare in nursing homes and hospitals, the world of automobile retailing, in the world of big-box retailing, and in the world of computers.
May I be so bold as to suggest when you try to lecture me on what works and does not work in automobile dealerships, retailing and health care, you are a bit like, as we say out here in Appalachian country.... a broken kettle trying to insult the pot for being an undesirable color. (I know, there is a more cryptic version of that, but we are pretty sophisticated here at the south end of Appalachia these days.)
We could have a discussion of how those businesses work but it probably needs to take place off-line or in some other forum... for it has little to do with broadcasting.
Even if you own a blowtorch of a station in San Francisco, as I understand the business, you sell advertising ONLY if you have respectable ratings, and you only achieve good ratings by putting some kind of "audio content" on the air. It could be an ingenious format of music. It could be tapping into syndication and carrying the best Talkers in the business. But if you put spoiled sauerkraut out there for program content, your sales will melt faster than a snowstorm in Memphis.
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