After negotiating the price on rocker WKQX-FM in Chicago, Cumulus and Merlin Media have come to a new agreement that will lead to Cumulus keeping the station after all. Cumulus will also get the WLUP-FM call letters and all WLUP intellectual property from Merlin.
Cumulus has been operating WKQX under an LMA for four years and had agreed to purchase both WLUP-FM and WKQX-FM for $50 million back in 2017. That all changed when Cumulus filed for bankruptcy last November. Cumulus asked the court to nullify the deal because the stations had lost $8.4 million since 2014 and they weren’t worth $50 million.
Cumulus was paying Merlin a $600,000 per month LMA fee for both stations. Following the bankruptcy filing Cumulus had that reduced to $15,000 per month per station for what the court called “reimbursement costs.” Merlin sold WLUP to Educational Media Foundation last month for $21 Million. How much Cumulus paid for WKQX was not announced in the Tuesday press release.
Cumulus CEO Mary Berner said, “After operating the station for the past four years, we are delighted to be able to bring this beloved station under Cumulus’s ownership on economic terms that make sense for our business. We look forward to continuing to deliver the best alternative rock programming to our devoted listeners in the Chicago area for years to come.”
Cumulus will continue to LMA WKQX until closing.
