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Audacy stock price
- Thread starter RadioGuy1864
- Start date
His role was specifically to oversee programming. So to have him involved was not outside of his job description. That was how Cumulus was structured. Audacy is set up differently.
I worked with David many moons ago. He didn't get involved in day to day things like what stations are programmed or what artists are played. Rightfully, his main involvement involved market sales and managing budgets.
David Field has announced a 7-step plan to "navigate economic turbulance:"
www.insideradio.com
None of them involve format changes at local stations.
David Field Outlines 7-Point Gameplan To Navigate Economic Turbulence.
After starting the year with first quarter revenue growth of 14%, management at Audacy believed they were on a path to return to the bright financial skies of 2019. But
None of them involve format changes at local stations.
Cue the outrage from the armchair program directors on this site.
One thing that David didn't bring up, was one needs to remember that Audacy/Entercom hot hit badly with ransomware. Not once, but twice. That alone probably delayed and curtailed advancement of their original digital platform, considering it required replacement of every PC and sever in the organization. That in itself was a huge chunk of change.
Audacy RIF's Are Underway
AUDACY has commenced with RIF's nationwide since the company is facing delisting by the NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE. As previously indicated, cost-cutting measures are imminent, and rumors of company-wide layoffs have been prevalent in the last week (NET NEWS 8/16).An official spokesperson for...
Here are some cuts at Audacy.
Audacy Cuts: Sports WSSP Milwaukee And KXST Las Vegas Drop All Local Programming.
The ongoing cuts at Audacy have resulted in two sports stations dropping local programming in favor of a network feed. “1250 The Fan” WSSP Milwaukee has wiped out all local
Here is more cuts at Audacity.
Tim Allen
Here is more in response to the cuts at Audacy.
KDKA Pittsburgh Revamps Its Lineup After Dismissing Morning Co-Host Kevin Battle.
Here is more in response to the cuts at Audacy.
KDKA Pittsburgh Revamps Its Lineup After Dismissing Morning Co-Host Kevin Battle.
Ya kinda get the feeling that the seeds of this mess were sown back when the FCC loosened the ownership restrictions?
Before dereg, the stations were in many cases owned by the person or company that originally put them on the air. There was very little debt service and the people who ran them were well experience in broadcasting. The FCC actualy had some teeth and fines were pretty rare. Stations hardly ever went dark
Then, after dereg the wall street sharks moved in. They paid crazy multiples for broadcast properties and had astrinomical debt service. Bankruptcies skyrocketed. Diversity of ownership and programing vanished and properites started going dark.
Before dereg, the stations were in many cases owned by the person or company that originally put them on the air. There was very little debt service and the people who ran them were well experience in broadcasting. The FCC actualy had some teeth and fines were pretty rare. Stations hardly ever went dark
Then, after dereg the wall street sharks moved in. They paid crazy multiples for broadcast properties and had astrinomical debt service. Bankruptcies skyrocketed. Diversity of ownership and programing vanished and properites started going dark.
If you look at the boards of most public corporations with radio stations, you see business, legal and legislative experience as the most prevalent... not former program directors.
Yes, and it was a smart decision at the time for what is a pretty "white" company. That is the sort of thing CEO or COO officers do, working with their support staff.
I don't think format changes, other than as a bullet point in quarterly memo to the BoD, are board discussion issues.
I've been part of board meetings or contributed reports for six different public corporations; format modifications were not the subject of board action (discussion, approval, etc). Boards deal mostly with the bigger picture such as debt, refinancing, expansions, acquisitions, appointment of a CEO or CFO, top executive compensation, declaration of dividends, pending lawsuits, legislative actions that could impact the bottom line, industry trends, SEC issues and that kind of thing.
In a smaller group, a board might review management incentives for the next year but as to PDs, format modifications and the like deep discussion is very unlikely.
At the most, it might be "One of the stations in Anytown, WAAA, on a stand-alone basis is negatively cash flowing, so we are doing research with (Coleman, Edison, etc.) to find a more viable format and hope to make changes later this year". A change will not impact our projections... and moving on to debt service, here is the auditor's report for Q2 and Q3..."
No. We've addressed this mythology many times.
The original companies, such as GE or NBC, got out of radio in the 80s, more than 10 years before deregulation. Same with some big insurance companies such as National Life. The thing that pushed them out was the declining profitability of radio brought on by increased competition with the FM explosion. The antiquated ownership regulations were stifling the growth of radio. So they were loosened many times before the bigger change in 1996. Radio companies were doing fine under deregulation until the stock market crash in 2008. Just as Audacy was doing fine with the CBS purchase until the pandemic and recession.
The Wall Street sharks started investing in radio in the 70s and 80s. Read the story of Robert F X Sillerman. KKR and Bass Brothers investment companies got involved in the 80s. The seeds of the 96 Act were sown by the Reagan administration in the 80s. They wanted to cut the size of government, and that meant shrinking the role of the FCC.
Bankruptcies were caused by bad management and bad economies, not radio consolidation.
No, I trace it to Docket 80-90 that overpopulated the dial in every small and medium market and made profitability tough in most bigger markets due to move-ins and upgrades. Docket 80-90 forced the FCC to loosen ownership rules to make up for their mistake.
That is not true with rare exceptions. The big independent companies of that era expanded by building up to 7 AMs and , later, 7 additional FMs. When they were at the limits, they sold the smaller ones.
In 1940, we had under 1000 stations in the US. Now, we have over 15,000.
By the 50's, many of the original owners were out of the business. Some moved to TV, others got out of radio. The limitations of just 7 stations of any type kept larger investors out and the feeling that "radio was over" in the 50's got many early owners to cash in. For example, in the later 50's The Cleveland Plain Dealer felt that radio was dangerously decrepit and they sold WHK to Kluge.
George Storer started with an AM in Toledo. He added things like Wheeling and Fairmount in West Virginia. When he moved upwards to San Antonio, Philly and Detroit and Cleveland, Fairmount was sold. And then Wheeling went away to get Miami and then smaller ones were sold to get KGBS and WHN. George Storer never put one on the air originally.
The same goes for the big names in radio's rebirth in the 50's and 60's with companies like Eaton's United Broadcasting (Aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!), Rollins, Storz, McLendon, Air trails, Gene Autrey Station, Balaban, Bartell, Crowell Collier, Vic Dieham, Fetzer, Good Neighbor, Forward, Hearst, Kaiser, McClatchy, Meridith, Metromedia (Metropolitan), Peoples (Nationwide) Palmer, Plough, Rahall, Rau, Ridder, RKO General, Dee Rivers, Seaton, Starr (Burden), Susquehanna, Taft, Time, Transcontinent, triangle, Westinghouse and lots of others.
Just look at the group ownership section in the 1960 Broadcasting Yearbook here: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-BC-YB/1960/BC-YB-1960.pdf
Each of these companies, big or small used debt to expand to additional markets or to trade up when they had the legal limit of stations. Some were good broadcasters, others were not so good.
There were only 600 FMs in 1960 and the number of AMs was about 35% less than today. Daytime AMs could make money, and markets had not outgrown the signals. Today there are 3 times as many stations, and ad budgets are not sliced as thin due to new media.
The FCC did revoke licenses, and competing applications were more common at renewal time. As to "teeth" the FCC mostly regulated technical matters and equipment was far less stable and reliable. We have outgrown that for the most part.
In real dollars, radio bills about 35% of what it did in 2000, with many more stations and new media competition. The signals that don't fully cover a market are failing. AM is of no interest due to quality of audio outside of seniors. Big Box stores killed local revenue in Lake City, FL or Charlevoix, MI or Prescott, AZ.
The FCC allowed consolidation because by 1995 over half of all US radio stations were losing money. And the companies that wanted to stay in radio all wanted to buy lots more stations, so they overpaid... just before the Internet hit us all in the face!
Programming diversity actually expanded greatly under consolidation; if you owned 5 FMs in a market, they all could not be CHR or AC. So group owners might each have 5 stations in the top 20, but some of them had formats that were 13th or 16th or whatever, but combined they made great packages. So markets ended up with lots more different formats than ever before because owners could be happy with one or two in the top 5, one or two in the next tier and a couple below #10 in share.
When I was a kid in Cleveland in the late 50's, we had 3 Top 40's, 3 MOR stations and two Black stations out of 8 viable stations. Now, there are about 24 different formats on 39 stations licensed to the market.
I posted an article here on RD several months ago about a former station owner in West Virginia. When he started out, there were only 2 local stations in that town. Both competed fiercely, but the owners and staff respected each other and there were plenty of advertisers to support both financially. Once 80-90 happened, the number of signals there exploded, and his station kept getting a smaller piece of the available ad revenue. The only way he felt he could keep his head above water financially was to automate evenings and overnights. A few years later he automated everything but mornings. A few years after that, he decided it was just no fun anymore and he sold his station(s) and got out while he could still turn at least a bit of profit. As others have stated, once big box stores moved in and the mom and pops went away and ad spend decisions were made by regional or national staff or agencies, that made it even more difficult to survive financially.
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Unlike Mr. A and Mr. Eduardo, I think there is a kernel of truth to this, but only in limited situations.
There is a difference in the thinking between a businessperson who has only one significant asset, and a businessperson who has dozens or hundreds of assets. Take WBEB-FM in Philadelphia. Jerry Lee put a lot of work into making WBEB what it was: a dominant AC station in a top 5 market. Audacy took over and is using a different strategy.
And, in case you did not notice, Mr. Lee had to sell because the price he paid his partner for the "other half" of the station had become so devalued after deregulation that his investment was worth nearly nothing. He paid $87 million for half of the station in 2006. In 2018 he sold to Entercom for $57 million. So, not only did he lose his own equity, he loast $30 million more on what he paid to his partner's estate.
Since he did not have any other radio property and was a sole-station owner, the hit he took on the station value wiped out his investment equity.
At that point, when he sold to Entercom, the market revenue had declined so much (over half between 2000 and 2018 in inflation adjusted dollars) that the new owner had no choice but to cut expenses quite broadly.
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Part of that was due to the 2008 recession which actually just started building steam in 2006. By Q4 of 2008, the bottom had fallen out of just about every broadcast valuation, let alone stand-alone stations. He's lucky that he ended up only $30M in the hole.
And unfortunately, that's what had to be done with stand-alone stations, insert the economies of scale to support a group, rather than one-off's.
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That would have been fine had FM not doubled the number of competitive stations in a market, and then Docket 80-90 added thousands more stations, diluting the value of that one significant asset to the point where it wasn't worth owning any more. That was the situation owners faced in the 80s. That's why NBC and GE sold all of their radio assets in 1988. There was no value any more. The FCC realized the game had changed, and increased ownership limits several times before the change in 1996.
Regardless of what happened with the TCA in 1996, there is nothing that would have stopped the increased competition from satellite or streaming. The writing was on the wall at the exact same time. That's why the music industry forced through the DMCA in 1998. Media was becoming digital, and the music industry wanted to get paid for digital airplay. They were right, and we live under this law today.
Very good point.
In many markets, as the 70's advanced, we went gradually from a small group of competitive AMs to double and even triple the total once FMs established themselves and upgraded to better technical facilities.
I use Cleveland as a typical larger market. Through the 50's and 60's there had been 7 to 8 viable AM stations (including one profitable daytimer). As FM began to develop in the 70's, it went to those 8 AMs as well as 15 viable FMs in the commercial part of the band and at least three of the educational segment with enough power to be factors in the market.
And, as the population moved out of the central City of Cleveland zone, many of the AMs became unable to cover the whole market's population, making those formerly valuable and top rated facilities that were WERE, WHK and WIXY unable to compete.
So now, in that market that had 7 truly viable AMs in 1960 we have one or two viable AMs and 16 to 17 pretty complete coverage FMs. So the market has more than double the useful/usable signals while population has decreased or been stagnant.
A huge percentage of markets in slow-or-no-growth states have seen the same thing, whether it be Milwaukee or Grand Rapids or Buffalo or Hartford or Youngstown or Charleston, WV or Roanoke or St Louis.
The Rust Belt was the most severely affected by the combination of population loss, suburban flight and added stations. But even growth markets like Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Denver and Salt Lake City and others like them found few if any AMs to remain viable while existing FMs and Docket 80-90 move-ins resulted in double or triple the viable stations in each market.
As you say, "it wasn't worth owning any more". And that is why so many of the "good" small broadcaster groups chose to get out in the mid-1990's instead of expanding. Instead, we got Cumulus and Citadel and all the other expansion disasters.
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