The Business of Radio

4/30/2018

 

by Jeff McKay & Tom Gordon

 

A radio station first – it was sold and the payment will be crypto-currency.  Colonial Broadcasting will sell their two FM’s, two boosters and two translators in the Olean, NY market to Richard Freeman and On Air, Inc for a negotiated deal of 3,770,668 “Ideum” tokens and $50,000 in cash for total compensation of $615,600.  A lot of listeners like Spotify, so much so that in the recently released Triton Digital rankings for February have Pandora with 2.53 million active sessions for the month, with Spotify continuing to close the gap at 2.493 million active sessions – and worthy to note last year at this time Pandora had more than an 11% advantage over Spotify.   Nielsen has more work to do – they discovered a “non-managerial media employee” was involved in the PPM process and will have to re-issue the New York City and Long Island ratings for March, which they claim Entercom-owned WNEW-FM “may be substantially affected.”   Sometimes radio stations have to deal with the personal lives of their staff, and in the case of Christian format WJTL-FM in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, it is the arrest of their afternoon drive DJ – 52-year old Phillip Smith was charged with numerous offenses including rape, sexual assault of a person under 16 and 13 other charges.  The station took to Twitter asking “for prayers for all those involved.”

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