The Justice Department has given John Malone’s Liberty Media the OK to increase its stake in iHeartMedia to 50%. Liberty now has a 5% stake in iHeart. Liberty already controls SiriusXM and Pandora and appears to be interested in owning a massive chunk of the audio space.
The deal was approved by antitrust prosecutors on Wednesday according to Politico which reported that a coalition of consumer and anti-monopoly groups, including the Open Markets Institute, Public Citizen and the Center for Digital Democracy, opposed the deal, arguing it would be “likely catastrophic” on radio markets and lead to fewer options, less diversity in programming and higher prices.
I hear Waste Management wants controlling interest in Cumulus. Who better to clean up the crap created by Mary Berner?
Don’t forgot that silver-spooned Lew Dickey either… he deserves most of the credit, for firing all the top local personalities and absolutely ruining legendary stations like KGO.
Where’s the “Big A”…[aka Pittman]? Hes usually here to defend himself.
Probably packing his golden parachute.
Chalk it up as another business Pittman has raped for his own gain.
Invest in Iheart??? That’s like investing in Blockbuster Video. Iheart is a joke. The managers are useless and they have destroyed local radio as we know it. Get out your golden parachute time.
Bob Pittman is the biggest charlatan in the business world. He has done absolutely nothing for iHeart but take a huge salary, fly around in the company jet and spend millions on lavish corporate remodels and festivals. When he started, iHeart was valued at over $20 billion. Today the publicly traded IHRT has a market cap value of $450 million – less than 2.5% of what it was. Other companies in the streaming/podcasting space – like Spotify – have huge market values. Spotify has a market cap of over $45 billion – 100x the value of iHeart. Bob has been saying that “sound is hot” for the last 7-8 years yet the ratings at iHeart stations continue to plummet. He is a fake, a fraud and a lousy leader. Great news if they run him out of town.
Too bad hes already extracted millions …in return for contributing nothing.
This is bad news for Bob Pittman and his management crew. If Liberty takes over, Pittman is gone, because both Pittman and Malone would want to be the boss, and there obviously is room for only one.
To the contrary, the deal may open up the broadcasting industry. IHM has too many stations in markets they don’t seem to want. The local cluster in my market is down to two employees for four stations. Their studio building is largely abandoned (roof leaks), and the “studio” they built in an office complex (mostly doctors/lawyers) has one full studio and tablet/mike for these four stations.
I suspect that Liberty will be selling off a lot of small markets if and when they take control.
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