Re: Easy listening

["Greg Franklin" <franklig@earthlink.net>]

Garrett Wollman <wollman> wrote:
><<On Tue, 28 Apr 1998 08:38:29 EDT, MikeHemeon <MikeHemeon@aol.com>
said:
>
>> Radio is a business and most radio station groups today are owned
by
>> stockholders and that is why they invested to begin with.
>
>We should recognize, however, that the conditions in the market are
>such that investors will rarely tolerate only making money---they
>demand that their investments make a LOT of money, much more than
>media properties have historically made.  (The publishing industry
>suffers from the same problem.)


And soon rock concerts?

My local (Seattle) alt weekly _The Stranger_ printed a cover story in
the April 23 issue documenting SFX Entertainment's attempt to become
the first national concert promoter and vertically integrated live
concert company.

SFX's president, Robert Sillerman, collected 71 radio stations and
sold them all last year to finance acquiring lots of regional firms:
venues, ticketing, artists' booking agencies, event production,
research and marketing, etc. He hopes to stitch this all together so
he can absolutely control all aspects of a tour -- and all revenue
sources.

New England points of relevance: Hartford's Meadows Ampitheater is an
SFX property, and Boston promoter Don Low (Blackstone Entertainment)
is allegedly an SFX target.

Juicy quotes:
* From an SFX rep: "[The live-concert industry] was a very segmented
business that had not taken advantage of its full potential in terms
of getting its message out to a highly targeted audience due to
capital constraints."
* From an anonymous insider: "I'm sure they see the concert industry
as a sort of Neanderthal business that hasn't realized the
opportunities inherent in consolidation. They have a much larger view
of things. They believe they can roll up all the various parts of a
business and make a lot of money."

My opinion is that radio investors should have moved their money a
long time ago to high-tech or financial-planning or health-care stocks
if they REALLY wanted to make money. Thus they're pinning their hopes
on Mel K. and all his imitators to win really big....

Greg

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End of boston-radio-interest-digest V2 #52
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