Regardless of who came up with the idea to buy 105.1... if the station was up for sale, it's a good buy for ANY cluster to grab it before the competition does.
If CC didn't get it, who knows? Maybe Citadel would have had a country station by now. Or maybe Galaxy could have picked it up.
It's quite possible that CC never really cared if the station did well -- as long as they could have kept someone else from snatching it up and doing even better with it. It's just like when you play Monopoly... someone else owns two green properties and you buy the 3rd. You won't be able to do anything with that single property, but at least your competitor can't do anything with the other two, either. More of a defensive move than offensive.
(Citadel has kind of the same thing going on with Lite Rock 105.9. They don't promote it nearly as much as they promote 93Q and 95X, but they make a little bit of an effort with it... and if WLTI can shave a few points away from WYYY, with the end result making 93Q look better, that's probably all they're hoping for.)
As for the purchase price... CC got a double-whammy there. Everyone knows the Aloha stations "have" to be sold, so there's the first big bargaining chip for any prospective buyer. Second, it's just a crappy time to be trying to sell stations. CC didn't have much choice but to get whatever they could... and they probably figure it's better to go with Foxfur (who is least likely to launch a format that would compete with CC) than to sell the station to Citadel or Galaxy.
As for drawing a parallel to Utica, yes, it's true that Ken Roser was able to (indirectly) reclaim WSKS/WSKU for a fraction of what CC paid him for the stations several years earlier. But that sale was completely optional and completely stupid on CC's part. The FCC was not holding a gun to CC's head to sell off the Utica cluster. It was just their own corporate desire to sell all markets 100+. Nobody was forcing them to sell the cluster in such a hurry or at such a low price. But then again, they did such a poor job with those stations in the years leading up to the sale, it was hard to attract buyers -- and this was over a year BEFORE the entire stock market/advertising/broadcasting meltdown.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm glad the sale played out the way it did. Stations like Kiss and Mix sound much better under "local" management. But if CC had only done a better job in the years leading up to the sale, they could have had better ratings, and commanded a better price for that cluster. Too much automation, too many spots sold at very undervalued rates, and not enough promotional investments. Bob 102.5 was making decent inroads against Big Frog, but was never given enough time for a proper attempt. Mix 102.5 was a joke under CC's ownership -- starting with Whoopi in the morning, right on down to the use of the old Bob pick-up truck as a remote vehicle. Sounds better now under Galaxy control, but it's still taking that much longer to gain steam.
