Inside Music MediaJerry Del Colliano

Get this.

Thomas Lee Partners is co-owner with Bain Capital of Clear Channel.

Thomas Lee Partners also has a stake in Univision.

And in Cumulus.

And Nielsen.

Hmm, now I get why Clear Channel pays $100 million dollars of play money that they don’t have to Nielsen for a sketchy audience ratings service.

And you thought consolidation ended years ago.

This is what negatively impacts free market competition.

But there’s more.

Oaktree Capital owns Townsquare CEO Steven Price’s ass.

And now they are taking it to market for a payday like no other on the backs of stupid institutional investors who don’t know that Townsquare is a media company consisting on a lot of shitty market radio stations masquerading as the digital future.

Oh, Oaktree owns Triton Media, too.

And co-owns Tribune Company.

And yes, even owns a piece of Cumulus that supposedly competes with Townsquare and has even engineered deals between the two co-conspirators.

But, to paraphrase TV huckster Ron Popeil, if you order now you’ll get two for the price of one.

In addition to co-owning Clear Channel with Thomas Lee Partners, Bain Capital also owns a piece of Cumulus.

Entercom is owned by and large by 22 major investors including State of New Jersey Common Pension Fund A.

See, I told you these institutional funds have no idea that they are buying yesterday’s technology, clueless management, lots of debt and no future.

They’re all sleeping with each other.

When this country began to fail, it did so when Wall Street became more powerful than Washington.

Investment banks are not too big to fail, they are too omnipresent to compete freely.

When clowns at the Southern California Broadcasters Association make a case for the viability of radio going forward they are just – well, shills.

The RAB is a trade association that talks up radio and I get it. But you can’t expect solutions from them – only spin.

The NAB is the association that sold radio down the river in the first place by requesting and getting a rider added to The Telecommunications Act of 1996 that in effect allowed consolidation to ravage a pretty damn good local business.

The deck is stacked against the people who know how to run radio and keep it relevant going forward.

Maybe that’s why Jerry Lee’s More FM outbills the big boys in Philadelphia year after year.

The devastation to careers and local communities is beyond description.

And as digital challenges radio in the media space, the few inbred partners that control everything are after one thing and one thing only.

A rigged game that makes them more money.

Oaktree now has the audacity to be cashing in on the Townsquare IPO – a crappy little company that never made it in radio or digital and did so taking advantage of its fine employees who were sold a bill of goods.

Clear Channel will go public next to repay its owners and pay down some debt to make it look like a viable merger partner.

Even the little guys make me nervous.

Digity?

Betcha they roll up some more shitty little markets and sell the whole damn thing. Are they really among the saviors of radio or carpetbaggers?

And even Larry Wilson who is seen as the Messiah of Saving Radio sold the last company he put together, Citadel, to Forstmann Little for a neat $2.1 billion.

Everybody wants to sell.

Nobody wants to operate.

It’s hard enough to compete in the almost infinite media business today but harder still when the people who own you are playing their own game of Monopoly.

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