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K-Love Acquires B93.3 & FM102.1
- Thread starter lanceventa
- Start date
That's so odd. Usually they cut the old stream when the station turns over. So now they have access to the FM1021 IP? Doesn't make sense too me.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone bought the FM1021 IP and turned it into an online station.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone bought the FM1021 IP and turned it into an online station.
I find it odd that on the website the list of currently played songs still shows what would be on the air now if Air 1 didn't take over the signal and online feed. I wonder what the delay in changing 93.3 is. Here in the Greenville SC market when K Love launched the two signals that flipped to Air 1 soon followed suit within the hour. I still wonder if 93.3 will be traded to another market that K Love wants since they own 105.3fm but I figured that would be announced by now.
93.3 will be K-Love. It's a 50k equivalent full market signal, whereas 105.3, a class A licensed to Mukwonago is not. If anything they would change or sell that one.
Unlike the B93.3 situation, which held some IP value. IHeart was pretty smart in how they acquired it, and used the old station to drive traffic to the new one. Amd they got it done in time to prepare for the Christmas music onslaught.
Not much one can do with a station called "FM102.1". And not much on a webcaster with no on-air personalities. The station thrived on a local presence, which would be pretty tough to do as an online operation.
Years ago, when Q101 in Chicago was sold and flipped to an ill-fated news format, someone bought the Q101 IP and set up an online streaming version. It didn't really do much, but it hung around for a decade. In the meantime, Cumulus bought the 101.1 frequency and WKQX call letters and desired to flip it back to alt. rock. It took a few more years of negotiating before they could obtain the Q101 rights from the webcaster, who had threatened to sue various times in the past for getting too close to his turf.
As for the death of FM102.1, I've already been getting more aquainted with 88.9. At least we've got that. And in some ways, I actually prefer it. No corporate bubblegum dreck like Imagine Dragons or Twentyone Pilots, and they don't pound the crap out of the 90s grunge bands. Oh, and the preset button formerly belonging to 102.1 is now set to 91.7 WMSE. I figured I'd give it a shot.
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Normally when K-Love acquires a station they just put their satellite feed at the transmitter site. Because this deal has yet to be approved by the FCC or close, they simply put the Air 1 feed into the airchain. The automation is still running the Alternative automation in the background so the metadata on the stream continues to show what music would be playing had that audio was outputted.
After the deal was announced, there was some talk that one of the two stations might be sold or traded, but that went silent quickly. With the intellectual property going to iHeart, 93.3 would offer nothing but stick value to a commercial buyer. At this point, it almost certainly has more value to K-Love than it does to anyone else in the market, and not many people would want to enter the market with just one station.
Attempts were made.
K-Love was trying to acquire a station in one of the other larger markets it is not yet in a swap for 102.1. However the group they were targeting did not want to give up a station in a larger market that had existing revenue for just the 102.1 license. They wanted cash from K-Love as well, but that was apparently a non-starter.
Klove bought two signals in the Twin Cities but decided to spin one off to another Christian format leaving K Love only on a translator while Air One got the better C3 signal.
That's true, but, while I suppose such a scenario can't totally be ruled out, I wouldn't expect it here. The Twin Cities was a different situation with the station it spun off being a Class A that didn't cover the entire market. Plus, the Twin Cities already had an excellent contemporary Christian station with a long heritage in the market in KTIS. Milwaukee doesn't have competition like that, and K-Love's strategy would seem to have changed in the last ten years.
So, three reasons for that as was already alluded to below:
1. If you look at the coverage area for the station they sold off (for exactly half the purchase price of the pair) the coverage area is actually very similar to their translator at 99.9, 95.3 would have added very little value.
2. 95.3 sold for exactly half of the purchase price of the two signals, so K-Love saw it as a good deal AND it sold to the people who owned it before it was sold and converted to a commercial station, another local CCM brand. Side note that the old owner not only got a good deal on the 95.3 frequency, but they made out like bandits on the original sale, having gotten nearly $8 million for the signal either in cash or in barter agreements, later buying it back for $1.3 million.
3. EMF/K-Love has a long standing relationship with the owners of KTIS (the popular CCM station in town started by Billy Graham decades prior). In the past, that mattered and they didn't want to compete. This changed after the sale of 95.3 and may not be true if the transaction had occurred today.
It's also important to note that EMF at the time didn't really "want" the stations as neither one is really a full market signal, but the previous owners increasingly got desperate to offload it. It had been on the market for years prior, but the original asking price for the pair was WAY too high. By the time they got desperate enough to sell it, we were in the midst of the COVID 19 recession and most other station groups were struggling even to survive. I'd speculate that had they come close to the final selling price PRIOR to the pandemic we might have seen another owner (Likely either Hubbard or CBS/Entercom) pick them up at that price, but they just simply couldn't justify it at the time the sale happened. That's speculation on my part but I also suspect they aren't "Done" in Minneapolis, simply waiting for another owner with a full market signal to get desperate enough to make a deal.
Your analysis is very spot on. (I was near the market at the time that all went down.)
I believe Lance mentioned on a different thread that the 105s were likely to go in a separate transaction (I believe tied to an initial one in Dallas before Salem happened), but fell through.
I'd believe that, but the 105's combined aren't really a "full market" signal either. When ABC first bought them in the 90's they had an opportunity to upgrade (I'm guessing at quite a large cost) but now they are pretty shoe-horned in. 105.1 indeed does a good job covering the south metro, 105.7 was downgraded to "just above translator" status and put on the IDS to better cover the "core" cities, and 105.3 covers the north suburbs (strongest signal of the 3 but largely covers not much due to location), but the three signals do have quite a few "gaps" in city grade coverage, mainly in the east and west metro area which are both growing quite rapidly.
The 105's also felt like stations ABC didn't really want, but bought because the (contrary to popular belief) very large conglomerate that owned them (Cargill) was looking to get out of radio. Rumor is that the stations were bought for the "kids" who believed that the former KJJO people pitching the format had a station idea they really liked but later became sort of "bored" with the whole thing. A shame really, I still remember my "Rev 105" survival kit! At the time they were used as a flash point against radio consolidation because the perception was that they "bought them simply to eliminate a competitor" but older me is less convinced of this strategy, especially considering just how successful that "competitor" was (still being the number one alt rocker in the country EVEN WITH the competition!)
I was actually expecting Cumulus to shut down the three signals in the big "sweep" about a year ago when they shut off a lot of other signals, but they must make enough to justify keeping them around for now. (Although admittedly I am not in the industry, maybe Lance has some insider info that I am unaware of!)
And now, WLDB has switched to K-Love. B93.3 is officially gone.
A listener in Milwaukee has complained to the FCC that there's "too much christian radio:"
www.insideradio.com
My take is the FCC will say it doesn't regulate formats.
Does Milwaukee Have Too Much Christian Radio? FCC Being Asked to Weigh In.
A Wisconsin listener is urging the FCC to reject EMF’s $4 million purchase of Milwaukee’s WLUM-FM, arguing the Air1 flip would oversaturate the market with Christian radio and erase the
My take is the FCC will say it doesn't regulate formats.
With the FCC open again I wonder when WLVE will move to 93.3 and 102.1/105.3 Air 1 gets new calls.
Won't be until the license transfers are actually approved. But yes, I think it's pretty likely too that 93.3 becomes WLVE.
Still no attempt to change calls. The sale has been granted but still pending to go non comm. WLVE on an Air1 signal is crazy. They changed Tampa and Birmingham right before the Shumer shutdown.