Wanna buy a radio station? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Wanna buy a radio station? (2015)

darrylparks.com

39 points11thEarlOfMar26 comments

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.

> 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).

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.

What impact do you feel local ownership has on quality? Are we talking about the content that is played, the hosts, or the ads?

Where is the list of dark stations, I could really enjoy that one ;)

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

> subtly slow down/speed up tracks to hit a deadline as needed

Jesus, I've always suspected this (listening to the radio and a song just feels a little wrong) but never had confirmation. What's that "feature" called?

I don't remember, it was one of an enormous number of settings in a very complicated piece of software (and a decade ago when I was last exposed to it). The stretching was usually very minimal, on the order of ~10 seconds over an hour, so ~0.3% max (the rest of the timing would be managed by selecting tracks with appropriate lengths).

Some names came to mind. The company that made the most common software that I can remember seeing was called ENCO; it appears that their current offering in that vein is called MusicMaster[0].

[0] https://www.enco.com/products/musicmaster

We had a local AM station here that the guy broadcast from his laptop in his RV, sending the stream via the internet to the transmitter. So, don't be surprised of some really are run from somebody's laptop...

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.

Pretty annoying twice a year during pledge drives, but that's a small price to pay ;)

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."

> Radio's best currently working business model, is the Patreon model

Exactly what happened after a "political" purge and ensuing mass resignations at Polish Radio 3 - radio personalities went to form (both internet only) Radio 357 and Radio Nowy Świat which rely on supporters on Patronite (Polish Patreon equivalent).

Most of my music discovery lately has been Shazaming local college radio: http://wruv.org/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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