The past two days, Tom Taylor has been leading with the news that Robert Pittman is becoming involved with Clear Channel and might even be looking to facilitate a buyout. This seems extremely plausible and nobody knows the radio business better than Tom.
It’s worth first rereading my blurb about the history of Clear Channel.
The two most important things to know is that Clear Channel owes about $20 billion on debt it used to buy up around 1,200 radio stations (about 1/3 of which they no longer own) and that a few months ago the Private Equity firms that control the company forced out the Mays family who originally put the company together – and they haven’t named a replacement.
Who is Bob Pittman and why would he be a good choice to run Clear Channel? His entire career has been involved in the Entertainment business and finding ways to make money from things that didn’t exist before he came along.
As a young man, he worked in radio – he achieved the fairly stunning achievement of programming WNBC in New York by the age of 23.
Biography from the Museum of Broadcast Communications
From radio, he moved onto NBC’s TV stations – then this thing called Cable TV showed up. Pittman had this idea for a cable channel to show a new thing called a “music video” and MTV was born.
After leaving MTV, he went to work for the newly merged Time Warner. He was put in charge of the Six Flags amusement parks. He left to become CEO of Century 21 real estate.
Then Mr Pittman met this guy named Steve Case who had been running a thing called America Online – which was mostly a chat service for Apple owners that touched this new thing called “The Internet” in 1995 and exploded overnight. Bob Pittman was brought in to turn AOL into a real company. He ran the place during the time AOL grew very big by closely studying how people used the Internet, figuring out how to make the technology simple to use, making strategic acquisitions and figure out how to make money doing it.
AOL would grow into such a big and powerful company that it was able to take over his prior employer Time-Warner, just before the Internet Bubble popped in 200. Time Warner was not happy about being taken over, and when AOL’s accounting problems surfaced, the powers that be ultimately pushed Steve Case and his AOL comrades out of their company. Pittman left in 2002. Since then, he has been dabbling with private equity firms, some of which are invested in radio.
In the big scheme of things, $20 billion is not all that much money to grab control of the dominant radio media company in America and find a way to make radio relevant again to younger people. I think this could work out.
ASL?
