Liberty Wants Larger Stake in Sirius XM

5-8-2012

Following a rejection from the FCC, Liberty Media's John Malone is taking steps to gain more control of Sirius XM by purchasing more shares. The FCC declared Liberty's request for de facto control of Sirius XM incomplete. On Tuesday, Liberty said it will purchase 302 million shares which would raise it's stake to over 45%. Currently Liberty has a 40% stake in Sirius XM.

On the topic of taking defacto control of Sirius XM, Liberty's chief executive Greg Maffei said, "As far as de facto control, my layman's understanding would be we have a certain series of rights by contract with SiriusXM. To be able to fully exercise those rights freely, we need to have de facto control approved by the FCC. And as far as changing our application, I think there are host of things, actions we might take including this action we have taken, which will have bearing on our application and we'll weigh those, as we said, over the next 30 days and decide how to amend."

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"Pandora Larger Than Most Radio Stations This Year."

3-6-2012

Pandora CEO Joseph Kennedy stepped up his assault on radio yesterday as he detailed some of his sales and ratings plans, hoping to take a chunk of radio's $17.4 billion revenue pie. During the quarterly earnings call yesterday Kennedy said the Pandora share of audio listening has grown from 2.71% to 5.5 %. And, he adds "we have transitioned from being a small to medium sized radio station in every market in the U.S. to one of the largest radio stations in every market in the country. Based on the growth we continue to see, we anticipate that by the end of this year, we will be larger than the largest FM or AM radio station in most markets in U.S. As a consequence, our relevance to buyers of traditional radio advertising in skyrocketing. We have already begun to see the early benefits of this dramatic change. Our audio advertising more than doubled to more than $100 million in fiscal 2012."

On the sales front, Kennedy gave a little more detail about how he planned to take away some of radio's revenue. "We have accelerated our investment in radio ad sales personnel both local and national. We are finishing the initial process of staffing local radio ad sales teams in most of the top ten U.S. markets. We are also working with Triton on a ratings system. It will be powerful, more targeted, more measurable and a more interactive advertising solution than that provided by broadcast radio." Kennedy said meaningful revenue from the local radio markets is 18-24 months away.

(3/7/2012 9:21:47 PM)
Comparing Radio to Pandora is like comparing apples to arseholes. However, while some folks are out here innovating, Radio-types continue to dump where they sleep... so to speak.
(3/7/2012 6:28:02 PM)
But, radio has Struble's HD Radio scam!
(3/7/2012 12:52:01 PM)
What do you get when you place two dimes on a board and then tilt it?

A paradigm shift.

The thing we call “radio” is migrating to a new platform—plain and simple. I sure don’t envy people who own or manage sticks right now and if you work at one of these places, it’s probably time to tune up your resume—and perhaps learn more about the internet than “left click, right click, tweet”.

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