Jim Boyle: No Good News For Q4

Tough Quarter Ahead

CL KING’s radio analyist JIM BOYLE has taken a look behind SEPTEMBER’s 8% decline, and concludes Q4 looks worse.

In his newsletter, BOYLE writes that they're "Cutting our industry Q4 revenue forecast from a 6% decline to down 9%. The feedback from an increasingly wider sampling of our 40-plus markets indicate that OCTOBER could very well be similar to the 11% plunge of AUGUST. NOVEMBER does not appear to be much better."

He does point out that "Small-market radio surpasses big-market radio, but by a narrow gap. Small-market radio has surpassed big-market radio for 18 of the last 19 months, according to CL KING’s analysis. The average gap in revenue growth had been at 4.7 percentage points over the last 18 months. In SEPTEMBER, the average small markets that we reviewed were off 5% and the average large-market data we saw were off 7%. The gap narrows as the economy gets worse, as both declined by mid-single-digits percent.'

Calling for a "time to change," BOYLE concludes "it appears the average annual radio industry revenue increase during the 1960s was 8%. It looks like the average annual radio industry revenue growth during the 1970s and 1980s was 10%. It seems the average annual 1990s radio industry revenue improvement was 7%. It appears the average annual 2000s radio industry revenue uptick is under 2% to date. Admittedly, we are in a recession along with fiscal system turmoil that is harsh. But the rapidly changing, mutating media landscape is not likely to return to the less fragmented and confusing media world of the 1960s through 1990s."

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