[HN Gopher] Wanna buy a radio station? (2015)
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Wanna buy a radio station? (2015)
Author : 11thEarlOfMar
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-01-26 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (darrylparks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (darrylparks.com)
| anonAndOn wrote:
| The cost cutting for some of my local music stations has achieved
| new lows. I'm pretty sure a DJ (can you even call them that at
| this point?) records a series of 5-10 second clips that are
| randomly mixed throughout an oft-repeated playlist. An entire
| station could probably be run from somebody's laptop with a bunch
| of voice clips and a Spotify account.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Yes, even when I worked at an NPR affiliate station 10-15 years
| ago, automation like this was common. You could even set up
| lists of songs by theme ("evergreen", "newly released", "big in
| the last 6 months", "seasonal") and the software would rotate
| through them (avoiding playing songs too often or too
| infrequently as configured), pre-recorded
| underwriting/PSA's/promotions, station ID breaks, etc. It would
| even select tracks and subtly slow down/speed up tracks to hit
| a deadline as needed so that it could, for example switch to
| live or syndicated programming exactly on the hour without a
| noticeable interruption.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Just like my car is my only CD player, my car was also my only
| radio until I got into drive in theaters during the pandemic and
| bought a little portable radio so I could hear the movie while
| sitting outside my car on nice nights. I used to have a radio as
| an alarm and a portable one so I could always listen to the game
| or maybe Art Bell. All that is replaced by my phone now, although
| it is nice to be able to listen to a Phillies game on a nice day
| when I'm out and about...
|
| With so few radios out there, it's not surprising that it is hard
| to make money. Hopefully stations get cheap enough to buy and
| operate one day to change the equation, but for the foreseeable
| future, streaming & podcasts will be cheaper and easier.
| hffftz wrote:
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| The share prices listed for the radio companies in the article
| were $0.21(CMLS)and $1.50 (IHRT)respectively. Today CMLS is at
| 10.74, and IHRT at 19.29, which is a pretty insane jump. On the
| contrary to dying out, these companies went up in value! If you
| could have bought a station for $150K 7 years ago, and you owned
| one today, that seems like it could have been a great investment!
| (or maybe just buying some of the shares)
| tootie wrote:
| iHeart is currently the number 1 podcast producer by a mile.
| And Cumulus is #8. iHeart is also heavily invested in smart
| speakers (as is TuneIn) and bought Triton Digital which was one
| of the top programmatic ad networks for audio. I think this
| article was written at an inflection point and now that digital
| listening is exploding, they are riding that wave pretty
| effectively.
|
| http://analytics.podtrac.com/podcast-publisher-rankings
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It would be hard to imagine you couldn't make money buying a
| radio station for $150,000. Fast-forwarding to 2022 though the
| market cap of iHeart Media is $2.7B opposed to the $134M market
| cap of that time. On their web site they claim
|
| "more than 860 live broadcast stations in 153 markets across
| America"
|
| so that is around $3.1M per station.
|
| I think people on the West Coast have a distorted idea about the
| quality of radio and TV service in the rest of the US. Around
| L.A. there are 100+ TV channels available with a modest antenna
| not just because the industry is centered there but because
| millions of people have a view of the Hollywood sign or any
| antenna on a mountaintop.
|
| Starting around Ithaca and going south down to Alabama the
| terrain is a dissected plain where valleys take the place of
| mountain and if you are in one of those valleys you are lucky to
| get FM radio at all. I can't receive anything indoors with a
| clock radio or home theater receiver and in my car most stations
| will cut out somewhere between home and work. If they don't cut
| out there they will cut out when you go down 600 feet to Ithaca.
| I get the big networks and Fox and some off-brand stations from
| Syracuse but don't get ABC, I might put up a bigger antenna in
| the spring to try and get it or point another antenna at
| Binghamton. (At least I get football and the matchups have been
| excellent this year)
|
| Driving around upstate New York the one thing you could count on
| was getting the Rush Limbaugh show at noon, when the sun sets and
| the atmospheric D layer disappears it is fun to hear the fight
| between Bloomberg Radio talking about the stock markets about to
| open in Asia and the Black Information Network from Detroit.
|
| Thus my point of contact with iHeart Media is the streaming
| service which I usually use to listen to specialty shows on the
| two college radio stations that I can't get at home despite being
| 5 miles or so from the sticks.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It would be hard to imagine you couldn 't make money buying a
| radio station for $150,000._
|
| You would think so, but a couple of weeks ago I was looking at
| one of the trade web sites that published a weekly list of
| radio and television stations shutting down. Not put up for
| sale, or even going dark. Going away forever, as in turned in
| their license.
|
| I expected to see lots of AM stations there, but there was also
| FM and TV stations. Probably two dozen in total, just for that
| week. Surprising, to me.
|
| _I think people on the West Coast have a distorted idea about
| the quality of radio and TV service in the rest of the US._
|
| In my experience, it's market to market. I move a lot (~15
| cities in 14 states in the last 20 years). In spite of all the
| complaining I read on the internet, almost all of those markets
| have one or two, or even three really outstanding local radio
| stations.
|
| Then recently, I moved to a large city with absolutely terrible
| radio, and I understand all of the complaints. Before I thought
| it was just that people couldn't find exactly what they wanted.
| But even when you find the content you want, the presentation
| is awful.
|
| The common factor seems to be ownership. The more radio
| stations in a market with local ownership, the better the
| quality of the content on all stations.
|
| Even New York, which should have the best radio in the country,
| has gotten really really bad in the last five to ten years. And
| it seems like it really went downhill right when the big
| players got bought by out-of-state conglomerates.
| CSSer wrote:
| What impact do you feel local ownership has on quality? Are
| we talking about the content that is played, the hosts, or
| the ads?
| adventured wrote:
| > It would be hard to imagine you couldn't make money buying a
| radio station for $150,000.
|
| I owned a network of radio stations. You're buying a terrible
| job with a $150,000 radio station (anything sub ~$500,000
| actually). You better love radio. You're better off being a
| software developer above the median ($110,000+ per year with
| benefits).
| Aloha wrote:
| I'd actually love to buy a radio station, I'd love to buy 500 or
| 1000 of them if I could. There is a lack of diversity of
| programming across this country, especially on AM.
|
| I'd just settle for one, if I could figure out the how.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Most of my music discovery lately has been Shazaming local
| college radio: http://wruv.org/
| acomjean wrote:
| I listen to https://wmbr.org. They archive their shows so you
| can listen for a couple weeks after, and they make playlists.
| https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/
|
| I like the wruv live stream player, especially the volume
| needle.
| shuntress wrote:
| There used to be one really good alt-rock station near me and I
| didn't realize how consistent it was in my life until they sold
| the broadcast license in 2017 and went off the air.
|
| It seems like FM may be doomed to follow AM into the wasteland of
| horrifying echo chamber talk show and weird christian worship
| channels.
| rmason wrote:
| I saw the oil companies buy up all the independent fertilizer
| retailers in the seventies at a considerable premium. Less than
| ten years later they sold them back to the original owners for
| pennies on the dollar. I had the owners tell me they made more
| money from the sale and repurchase than they ever made retailing
| fertilizer.
|
| Makes me wonder if the same thing will happen in radio. What's to
| stop a corporate raider from scooping up one or both of these
| companies then breaking them apart and selling the stations
| individually or in groups? Bet they could double their money in a
| relatively short period of time.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| When I get into the car for a short trip and don't want to bother
| connecting my phone I listen to the radio and I often think that
| it is time to do a real reorganization on how we do radio in the
| USA. Sure we have HDRadio but where I live there aren't any. I
| think it is time to pick a date and switch all radio to digital -
| and preferably something free and open unlike HDRadio. They would
| probably end up selling off some of the frequencies but I would
| rather see it opened up so we could have something like SiriusXM
| but free over the air or hell even make it subscription over the
| air.
| jaywalk wrote:
| HD Radio is what we're stuck with in the US, thanks to
| Ibiquity's lobbying efforts many years ago. The only hope is
| that somehow they could be forced to open it up into a free
| standard, because the chances of the industry spending money to
| adopt another digital standard are practically zero.
| [deleted]
| daveevad wrote:
| There's a decent public safety argument that analog radio in
| cars is an excellent means to communicate with nearly everyone
| in the event of a major natural disaster, such as an earthquake
| which would disrupt power in most everyone's homes.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Here in Austin, TX we have 3 or 4 non-profit, community radio
| stations (two of them timeshare). Wait, actually one of them
| split into a news station and a music station a couple years ago,
| so now it's 4 or 5.
|
| Radio's best currently working business model, is the Patreon
| model. Except, public radio has been doing it since before
| Patreon.
| quxpar wrote:
| Pretty annoying twice a year during pledge drives, but that's a
| small price to pay ;)
| daveevad wrote:
| I wish NPR in the Bay Area would just pick a tech billionaire
| and more or less demand a pledge to stop the drive.
|
| "Mark could stop this at any time of his choosing."
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