It's a great idea. The LA Dodgers are part owners of KLAC with iHeart. It's a similar discussion to a team owning its stadium, or having it owned by the city. Does a team want to get into ownership, which means paying the cost, and pocketing the profit. Or having someone else pay you a rights fee. Most teams prefer to get paid the rights fee.
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Cumulus wants to nix the WLUP/WKQX deal
- Thread starter MarkW
- Start date
It's a great idea. The LA Dodgers are part owners of KLAC with iHeart. It's a similar discussion to a team owning its stadium, or having it owned by the city. Does a team want to get into ownership, which means paying the cost, and pocketing the profit. Or having someone else pay you a rights fee. Most teams prefer to get paid the rights fee.
PTBoardOp94
Walk of Fame Participant
Sports teams don't have a real good history of owning radio stations. The Minnesota Timberwolves, St. Louis Cardinals & Washington Redskins have all done so in recent years if you want to do some reading.
Not sure you can say the Redskins as a team owned radio stations. Their owner, Daniel Snyder, was also the owner of Red Zebra Broadcasting. But that was one of several media companies Snyder has owned.
PTBoardOp94
Walk of Fame Participant
If you want to be a legal beagle, yes, all three examples I listed were owned by separate corporations set up by the ownership of the three teams I listed. And all three focused programming, at least for a brief period, around the teams which the owners controlled. Corporations don't have agency.
That doesn't make it any more likely that the Chicago Bulls are looking to set up a corporation to purchase one or more stations from Merlin Media.
That doesn't make it any more likely that the Chicago Bulls are looking to set up a corporation to purchase one or more stations from Merlin Media.
ksradiogeek
Star Participant
Twins, not the Wolves.
Look at the Minneapolis situation. The stations owned by the Pohlad family receive terrible ratings, are inconsequential players in terms of revenue share, and exposure for Twins baseball broadcasts declined appreciably. It got so bad that Pohlad family decided to move the Twins to 830 WCCO starting next season.
The situation with the Angels was out of necessity; most people in L.A. care about the Dodgers, not the Angels. KLAA draws miserably poor ratings. To increase exposure, some (but not all) Angels broadcasts are carried by ESPN 710.
The St. Louis Cardinals example presented earlier is a good one! Didn't take long before they came crawling back to 1120 KMOX.
As far as the Redskins are concerned, again, exposure is an issue! Too few people were finding the games on AM 980 WTEM. For a few years now, games have been simulcast on AM 630 / FM 105.9 WMAL.
The Bulls are good to go; they'll be found on 670 The Score.
As for the White Sox? I suspect they'll wind up on AM 1000 or AM 560.
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