I have a friend who spent years as a radio broadcaster, who
when asked recently to speak to a group of broadcasting students at a state
university said “radio is not a sustainable career”.
Amen.
The business of radio broadcasting was destroyed by federal
deregulation. Like a cancer that doesn’t
kill you overnight, but gradually saps the life from you, deregulation was the
first step down the road to mass consolidation (a handful of companies like
Clear Channel and Cumulus own thousands of radio stations), which led to
unsustainable debt financing, which led to mass layoffs of the very essence of
local radio – the on-air personalities and news professionals, and when the
economy went sour a few years ago, it sealed radio’s doom.
This past weekend, a sad case on point surfaced: the owner
of KXLI-FM, once a powerhouse hundred-thousand-watt station serving Las Vegas, was
put up for sale on eBay.
That’s right, eBay.
Talk about irony: new media consuming old media.
The owner of KXLI-FM, Scott Mahalick, paid 22 million
dollars for the station five years ago.
As of this morning, the highest bid for the station on eBay was under a
hundred thousand dollars. The site
offers a “buy-it-now” price of 8.9 million dollars.
A couple more facts in evidence: Bain Capital, the Mitt Romney company, had a
HUGE role in the Clear Channel financing scheme, and those of us in the biz are
well aware of the thousands of Clear Channel radio employees who have been laid
off (fired) in the past couple years.
This has nothing to do with Mitt’s politics or my politics; it’s simply
a fact: venture capitalists have played a huge role in killing local radio.
What’s happened to “local” programming under mass
consolidators like Clear Channel and Cumulus?
Since they have so few remaining on-air employees, yesterday afternoon’s
NFL playoff game between the 49’ers and Giants was carried live on all seven of
the Cumulus-owned stations in San Francisco.
It’s simply cheaper to carry the same programming on seven stations,
which is absurd from an audience-generating standpoint, than to have to create
individual programming for all seven. Economies
of scale run amok.
I would say “Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be
radio broadcasters” – but I think by the time a child born in the past five years
reaches age 18, there will be no more local radio.
