The cluster, I'm told, was doing nearly $1 million a year but Cumulus was losing their rears which is not surprising. I heard they spent about $5 million putting this cluster together. There is a lot of radio there but reality is there are only two viable commercial operators in the market, Cumulus and iHeart, and they own all the viable FM signals. If Cumulus is getting $1 million annually then most of the remaining $3 million of annual revenue is going to iHeart and probably $2 million of that total is from WJIZ, the legacy urban 100,000 watter. I bet a lot of that business is agency/national. WJIZ has long enjoyed huge ratings. Cumulus has much better signals over Albany proper than iHeart. Other than WJIZ, the other iHeart stations have signals coming in from some distance away. All of Cumulus stations are right in Albany or just a few miles out of town.
If you dig deeper in the Cumulus sale contract, it looks like their office building is included plus a couple towers and some more real estate. I looked up and saw Dougherty County assessor's office has the studio office building valued at $600,000. Sell it, you still have $250,000 more than you paid for everything, keep the radio stations and it wouldn't have any impact on the revenue.
I think Cumulus is just desperate to shed stations. They are in the worst financial shape of any of the big operators and that was before the pandemic. Entercom is probably close behind them in second worse financial condition then iHeart would be third. Problem with all is they are still way too much in debt despite Cumulus and iHeart recently being in bankruptcy. You can't have much debt in a business model like radio which at best is a no growth slow decline business.
Albany went from being one of the fastest growing cities in the nation during the 1950s, 60s and early 70s to stuck in the muck especially after long time mayor and local power broker, media guru James H. Gray died unexpectedly from a blood clot during routine legal surgery in Boston. That was 1986. There wasn't much of a bench of leadership left.
It has been a long time since an on location local operator has run the radio stations there. In fact, there has never been since consolidation of the radio industry began in 1996. The new owner is going in the right away and that's not paying too much. There other cluster in is Bluefield, WV. That's no Garden of Eden either. They paid nearly $2 million for those stations. They must be doing pretty well or they wouldn't have ventured into another deal so soon.
The FMS station in Bluefield WV is live all day, but syndicated at night. So I'm guessing they'll keep Elaina and Blair.