Monthly Archives: July 2019

Thursday, August 1, 2019

Radio Getting Left Behind in Media Spending

INSIDE …

  • Radio has some really good news and yet the industry is getting screwed by advertisers – look here, every other medium you can name is getting a better break. Time spent listening vs. ad spend. 
  • Even print gets a better break than radio – how radio is getting left behind in media spending.
  • A startling new finding about ecommerce and retail sales.
  • Why there are problems ahead for targeted advertising, the category that has been siphoning off radio ad dollars.
  • Should radio be worried about time spent with digital media?

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019

iHeart Entertaining Offers

INSIDE … 

  • Keep an eye on Bob Pittman – in running all of his previous companies Pittman knew the exact time to depart – how that applies to iHeart now.
  • Why iHeart can’t continue the way it is for very much longer – how much longer?
  • What’s on the table in dealing iHeart – the entire company or this handful of attractive assets.
  • As I have said previously, Liberty Media wants iHeart and now we know how far they are willing to go to put themselves in the best position to steal it.
  • What their market managers know about the sale of iHeart.

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Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Major Cumulus Asset Sale Coming Soon

INSIDE …

  • The next shoe is ready to drop – here’s where.
  • I’ve been tickled by how Cumulus is taking what little they get for WPLJ and other major market stations saying the proceeds are being used to pay down debt – but here’s the truth about who is really getting the proceeds.
  • When will Cumulus finally acquire a station instead of just sell them as they’ve been promising -- the board is under pressure to reshape Cumulus – here’s how.
  • How Cumulus is looking like Reader’s Digest, Mary Berner’s first bankruptcy.
  • Lew Dickey, Townsquare and the new Cumulus – what they all have in common now.

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Monday, July 29, 2019

EMF’s Mastery of Radio

INSIDE … 

  • I know few hardcore radio people who like what EMF is doing buying up stations cheaply, but they may have stumbled over the future of commercial radio as well – here’s a page out of their playbook.
  • How EMF is prepared to deal with local markets in which they operate but have no presence.
  • The way EMF is handling one-to-many broadcasting in an era of on-demand content.
  • Non-profit EMF refuses to price acquisitions based on revenue multiples suggesting new options for commercial broadcasters looking to expand.
  • What does EMF know about radio that makes them an aggressive buyer in the digital era.

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Friday, July 26, 2019

Emmis Reinvented

INSIDE …

  • Jeff Smulyan is sitting on $100 million from the 76% sale of Hot 97 and WBLS in New York.  Here’s what he’s aiming to do with it.
  • Smulyan is a radio guy so is he shopping for station sales that are steals?
  • Why split the radio company from whatever comes next – here’s the reason.
  • And what’s up with this guy Soo Kim of Standard General – I am hearing that he likes radio at fire sale prices and he’s got a lot of money. Is he a buyer of more distressed properties?
  • To be painfully honest, is all this the end of Emmis or the beginning?

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Thursday, July 25, 2019

Entercom Revenue Decline Revealed

INSIDE …

  • I’ve got the revenue info for you for 2ndquarter 2019 compared to 2018 – important because this is the “pig” Entercom will be putting the “lipstick” on soon for analysts.
  • Best and worst markets, flat ones, troubling trends – not touched up by spin.
  • How Entercom will hide the major market revenue losses.
  • Now you see what investors are worried about – where revenue fails, why Entercom quarterly comparisons can’t be believed and the latest on their debt problems.
  • City by city revenue trends – the real trends – and why they are up or down.

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Wednesday, July 24, 2019

The Next Radio Boom

The present slump can’t last forever.

Radio station valuations are at an all-time low.

But some interesting things are beginning to happen.

Emmis and Cox have found ways to hand their debt to investors while they retain a minority interest and still get to manage their former companies.  Is that a sustainable model for others?

Apple Music and Spotify are cleaning up with audiences under 40 and yet a path forward is becoming evident for radio stations without having to have their own streaming music service.

What is projected to be the right time to start buying radio stations again and what will the next radio boom look like?

Read the full article now.

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Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Entercom’s Forced Errors

Yesterday Entercom stock (ETM) lost yet another 20 cents driving it to within 50 cents of being a $4 stock.

I have said many times over that the market knows a bad deal when they see it and from virtually the moment the CBS merger was announced Entercom stock crashed from the $16 range to $5.53 where it closed yesterday.

I’d like to have a dollar for every CBS survivor or victim purged by David Field who warned that Field was screwing up a merger so good all he had to do was essentially stay out of the way.

That didn’t happen and now even more information is coming forward to confirm that many if not most of what’s wrong with Entercom comes from forced errors that did not have to happen.

What’s worse, there are more huge mistakes that even investors don’t know about until this morning.

Read the full article now.

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See a complete list of my previous stories here

Monday, July 22, 2019

Public Market Prepping for Entercom’s Fall

INSIDE …

  • Entercom stock is less than a dollar away from being worth only $4 – what is the public market fearing about Entercom.
  • Think the CBS firings have stopped – think again.  An update.
  • Why a CBS exec thinks CEO David Field is “guilty of malpractice”.
  • Sports was to be a big part of Entercom’s revenue, now this revelation.
  • And the one thing that absolutely cannot happen without Entercom’s revenue taking a huge hit is if 1010 WINS and/or other all-news money machines slip. Well, are they?

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Visit our website for more – InsideMusicMedia.com

Friday, July 19, 2019

iHeart In Worse Shape After Bankruptcy

INSIDE … 

  • Alright, Pittman and Bressler got most of what they wanted in bankruptcy, now almost 3 months later the 3 things that threaten to drive iHeart into ANOTHER bankruptcy.
  • What happens to the company now?
  • All radio companies are experiencing hard times right now, so what happens next if iHeart can’t service their new, reduced debt load (from $16 billion to $5.75b).
  • How long before Bob Pittman’s $100 million bet on podcasting pays off?
  • What are the new iHeart revenue initiatives in the pipeline?

Read the full article now.

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Talk to Jerry privately here.

Visit our website for more – InsideMusicMedia.com

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Entercom Debt Problems

Just last week, a capital investor known as WY Capital put out a puff piece on Entercom calling it “Another Unappreciated Radio Company”.

The fantasy piece was so pro-Entercom that it could have been written by David Field himself.

It’s not known whether Entercom paid WY Capital for setting the record straight but that is a practice that is employed in the investment world these days.

Why all the happy talk now?

Why has David Field’s father, founder Joe Field, spent nearly $12 million in the first six months of this year alone to prop up Entercom’s drooping stock price?

If Entercom is so worried, what are they so worried about now?

Read more …

View a list of all stories here

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Connoisseur Becomes a Zombie Company

  • A Zombie company is one that needs bailouts in order to operate, or an indebted company that is able to repay the interest on its debts but not repay the principal – what went wrong at Connoisseur.
  • What did the principals have to pay to rescue Connoisseur from their chief lender.
  • So, what happens now – selling assets like Cumulus, swapping or buying stations.
  • What’s the real deal – what does the burned equity lender get?
  • What does the Warshaw led management group get?
  • And what about Warshaw’s alleged connection to the Cumulus reorganization – exposed here.

Read the full article now.

Free samples of our work here.

Report Newstips confidentially in our Witness Protection Program here.

Talk to Jerry privately here.

See a complete list of my previous stories here

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Cumulus Bay Area Dilemma

New York is almost gone – one more FM is in the process of being sold.

Atlanta and LA have been eviscerated along with other Cumulus stations that are able to be sold for whatever the market can bring which in these cases amounts to deep discounts.

The biggest dilemma for Mary Berner and her new board of directors who were forced to take over ownership when Cumulus couldn’t make their debt payments is whether to stay or whether to go.

A bellwether market for Cumulus is San Francisco where things are happening so fast that the company may be forced into emergency mode soon.

Read the full article now

Monday, July 15, 2019

The Stephens/Mapleton Takeover

Kagan is estimating that $771 million of radio deals were done in the second quarter.

They are guessing at multiples like the 7 times forward cash flow for Cox FMs and 6 times for AMs, a generous estimate at that.

And there’s the Meruelo steal of Cumulus’ KLOS for only $43 million in LA and other insulting offers taken by opportunists who believe now is the time to start buying radio again.

The big guys are on the ropes but a troubling trend for smaller market owners is also emerging.

Take the Stephens takeover of Mapleton.

When you look inside the deal, it presents a scary scenario for a segment of radio markets that are thought to be bulletproof.

Read the full article now

Friday, July 12, 2019

Taylor Swift and the Relevance of Major Labels

When Taylor Swift left Big Machine for Universal, she left her masters behind.

Now there’s a big kerfuffle over whether Swift was entitled to her masters as she seems to believe while at Big Machine begging the question just how important are the big 3 record labels in the era of streaming music?

There is new evidence that answers this question.

And some interesting new attitudes about the role of radio in hitmaking.

Read the full article now

Thursday, July 11, 2019

The Cumulus Dallas Sale

Most of New York and Washington are gone, LA is gone.

Cumulus continues to liquidate its assets as their lenders who in essence became the new owners after taking a $2 billion bankruptcy haircut assess whether they even want to be in the radio business.

Now there is new reporting on Dallas, other major markets and big corporate assets.

What the company is saying publicly and what is reportedly going on behind the scenes are two different things.

If Cumulus sells its network or prosperous revenue producing markets like Dallas will they be able to remain a going concern?

So, which one is it going to be? 

Read the full article now

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Subscription Radio

Clip Interactive wants to get radio stations to use their app so listeners can bypass long commercial stopsets and replace it with other things like a different station in the company featuring the same musical genre that is not in a commercial break.

Or podcasts, favorite songs, talk segments, traffic and weather and all the while staying synchronized to the station’s terrestrial signal.

They have their own research that claims terrestrial and even satellite radio listeners would pay $12 a month for this.

Clip thinks stations can even keep their revenue from ads that continue to irritate listeners on the air while mining a new stream of revenue from subscriptions to a new app.

Are these people nuts or are they onto the future?

Read the full article now

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

What was Emmis Thinking?

Emmis sold ¾ of its New York stations, retains ¼ ownership and gets paid to manage them.

Cox sells TV and radio and retains minority ownership and management stays in place.

There’s a trend developing here to take advantage of declining station prices and help owners get out of the debt business.

In fact, there’s a third group thought to be ready to sell partial ownership next.

Read the full article now

Monday, July 8, 2019

Rolling Stone’s New Non-Radio Music Charts

Can you imagine an album or hit song music chart without radio airplay as a component?

Rolling Stone can and their new charts reflect it.

The radio industry has a new role in making hit music and it’s nowhere near as critical to an artist’s success as it used to be.

While consumer-driven metrics are reshaping how we look at the apparent popularity of songs and artists, they are fast becoming more relevant than radio airplay.

This begs the question can radio continue to thrive when it is now being excluded from hit music ranking?

There are two important things stations can do to become more relevant again.

Read the full article now

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

The WABC Giveaway

If you thought the sale price for WABC, New York was shocking, how it came about is more shocking.

Even as WABC goes, Cumulus has reportedly distributed brokerage “books” out on stations some of which they claim are not for sale.

And there’s this -- two more Cumulus stations are likely to be given away to the best offer they can get within the next 30 days.

Employees are panicked.

And freaked out by the change in the way Cumulus is reportedly treating its employees during the asset selloff.

Read the full article now