You see a train wreck about to happen and know you can’t do a thing to stop it.
The Cumulus strategy has been to turn their news/talk stations into cookie cutter stations carrying almost nothing but Cumulus Media syndicated shows – Don Imus, Geraldo Rivera, Mike Huckabee, Mark Levin, John Batchelor, the Midnight Trucking Guys, and dumping Coast to Coast, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as soon as existing contracts permit to “save money”.
Sure it will cut costs. It will also kill ratings. Cumulus doesn’t believe in ratings and doesn’t subscribe to Arbitron (other than a few acquired stations). Arbitron no longer publishes numbers for non subscribers. The Cumulus “plan” seems to be to replace traditional advertising will Groupon like” deals – get 50% off a pedicure at Lisa’s Salon but you have to buy and prepay today. You don’t need an expensive staff of greedy sales people to sell that and it can be done from Atlanta with customer service from India.
The outcome of thus plan is not in doubt, only the time table.
Meanwhile, Sirius/XM is closing in on 23 million paying subscribers and Mel Karmazin looks poised to stop trying to be a one man team and allow the folks who saved him from bankruptcy a few years ago take control of at least part of the decision making. With spreading content money wider than just Howard Stern, growth could accelerate. Tom Leykus is waiting in the wings.
Dorks. They also should quit playing commercials during music or when the host is speaking.
Oh I bet ‘ i Heart Radio ‘ certainly didn’t help them any. Loosers
they deserve it.
Parrott
Funny you would mention iHeartRadio….. Cumulus has been adding iHeartRadio links to their web sites – for now you can use the bloated “News” player with the prestreaming ads or the iHeartRadio player without the prestream ads. I’ve started switching them to iHeartRadio since the other player wanted to generate one time validation keys to make sure you saw that ad.
On a related topic, back in April, Cumulus agreed to unload 55 of its tiny market stations to Townsquare Media, the Oaktree Capital entity that seems to be collecting non-viable radio stations for some unknown purpose – and giving Cumulus 10 radio stations in Bloomington and Peoria Illinois – the web sites are in flux at the moment.