Audacy is the combination of CBS Radio and Entercom. This is the last of the large radio companies to succumb to their debt. This is not a surprise as they’ve been telegraphing it for quite a while now – retaining a company to plan the restructuring.
This CNBC story headline is wrong. My ex-wife educated me that story headlines are written by editors and not the reporters. No matter how you measure it, Audacy is NOT the largest radio owner in the country. iHeart, Cumulus and Townsquare are significantly larger.
If you take off the commercial radio blinders, EMF (parent company of K-Love and Air1) and CSN (Calvary Chapel) are larger and have substantially larger positive cash flows they are using to buy up the failing commercial stations.
To make the headline accurate, it would have to say large commercial radio station owner and qualify it in the first paragraph that it is the largest radio company that had not previously been through chapter 11 bankruptcy… Perhaps the fact that the CEO of Audacy thinks he runs the largest radio company in the United States might be a part of the problem.
Possibly related, the FCC just decided that it’s okay for Canadians to own United States radio companies.
On Deck: The future of Salem media
I poked around in the SEC filings, and their claim is they are one of the two largest “scaled” radio broadcasters.
I have zero clue what the term “scaled” actually means.