Townsquare Media

• 1. Introduction

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  Townsquare Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on the 1st of March 2010 with $211.3 million in debt and just $166.5 million in assets. What came out the other side was one of the largest radio operators in America, a company that would eventually own 349 stations across 74 markets. How does a bankrupt radio group become the third-largest AM-FM operator in the country? And how does a company rooted in small-market broadcasting end up owning hip-hop magazines, comic book websites, and an amusement park company? That is the story of Townsquare Media, a company that has never stopped reinventing what it means to be in the radio business.

• 2. Terry Jacobs and Regent

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  Terry Jacobs founded Regent Communications in 1994, but his career in radio stretches back further. In 1979, Jacobs created Jacor Communications, a radio broadcasting company, before eventually departing and building Regent. A colleague named Bill Stakelin joined him, and together the two created JS Communications. The JS venture did not last long in that form. The pair sold Regent to Jacor in 1997, then immediately revived the Regent name for a new entity, with Jacor's blessing, to replace JS. Jacobs himself left Regent in 2005, but the infrastructure he built outlasted his tenure. By October 2008, Regent Broadcasting had struck a deal with a mobile audio platform called Radiolicious to stream all of its stations on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Regent was the first major radio group to contract for that kind of blanket mobile streaming coverage, a small but telling indicator that the company was watching where audiences were headed.

• 3. Bankruptcy and Rebirth

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  The pre-arranged bankruptcy plan that Regent filed in Delaware on the 1st of March 2010 was designed to hand control to its largest creditor, Oaktree Capital Management, which became the majority owner of the reorganized company. Old shareholders received 12.8 cents per share. Five co-founders, Steven Price, Stuart Rosenstein, Alex Berkett, Dhruv Prasad, and Scott Schatz, renamed the company Townsquare Media. The rebirth was immediately consequential. Oaktree also owned Gap Broadcasting Group, another radio company, and folded it directly into the new Townsquare, giving the company ownership of 171 radio stations in 36 markets from day one. That inherited scale gave Townsquare the mass it needed to start negotiating aggressively for more stations. A deal with Cumulus Media in April 2012 added 55 stations in 11 markets in exchange for Townsquare's Bloomington and Peoria, Illinois stations plus $126 million in cash.

• 4. A Second Cumulus Wave

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  Cumulus Media returned to the table in 2013, this time because it was buying Dial Global, a programming syndication service, for $260 million. To finance part of that acquisition, Cumulus sold stations to Townsquare in two separate deals. The first sent 53 stations spread across cities including Danbury, Connecticut; Rockford, Illinois; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Portland, Maine; and Rochester, Minnesota to Townsquare for $238 million. The second deal exchanged 15 more stations in Dubuque, Iowa and Poughkeepsie, New York for Peak Broadcasting's Fresno cluster. Peak, like Dial Global and Townsquare, carried a significant investment from Oaktree, and Peak's Boise cluster was folded into Townsquare as part of the arrangement. Because of market overlaps, three of Townsquare's newly acquired stations were placed in a divestiture trust. The acquisition of those Cumulus stations officially closed on the 14th of November 2013.

• 5. Going Public and Buying Print

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  On the 24th of June 2014, Townsquare Media filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, valuing the company at $143.8 million. One month later, on the 24th of July 2014, the company began trading at an initial offering price of $11 a share. The public offering gave Townsquare capital for a different kind of shopping. In September 2014, the company acquired XXL, King, and Antenna from Harris Publications. XXL was a well-established hip-hop magazine; King was a publication aimed at African American men; Antenna was a youth-oriented general magazine. After the acquisition, Townsquare stopped printing XXL and converted it to a digital-only operation. The move signaled something larger. Townsquare was not buying these titles to stay in print. The purchase of North American Midway Entertainment of Farmland, Indiana in August 2015 pushed the company even further from pure radio, giving it ownership of an amusement park operator running events in both the United States and Canada.

• 6. Digital Roots and Blog Acquisitions

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  The MOG Music Network deal on the 24th of August 2012 gave Townsquare an early foothold in digital advertising. MOG Music Network was an advertising network built around music blogs; MOG's streaming service had already agreed to be acquired by Beats Electronics by that point. On the 1st of October 2012, Townsquare created Townsquare Interactive, a digital marketing division focused on building web presences for small businesses across the country. That was followed in February 2014 by Townsquare Ignite, a unit selling online advertising solutions including pay-per-click, search engine marketing, social media advertising, and website retargeting. The blog acquisition strategy accelerated through a deal with AOL in June 2013. AOL had abruptly shut down its music division in April 2013, and Townsquare picked up several of the resulting orphaned properties: The Boombox, dedicated to hip-hop; The Boot, focused on country music; Noisecreep, covering heavy metal and hard rock; and ComicsAlliance, a site devoted to comic books. That single transaction handed Townsquare a diverse portfolio of genre-specific web publications with existing audiences. Taste of Country, a country music news website, had launched under Townsquare's own banner as early as December 2010, when the company first began overhauling its stations' websites.

• 7. Leadership Shifts and Late Deals

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  Steven Price, one of the five co-founders who named the company after emerging from bankruptcy, stepped back from the chief executive role on the 16th of October 2017. He moved to the newly created position of Executive Chairman of the Board. Bill Wilson and Dhruv Prasad were appointed Co-Chief Executive Officers. Erik Hellum was named Chief Operating Officer of Local Media. That arrangement lasted barely over a year. On the 2nd of January 2019, Townsquare announced that Prasad was leaving and that Wilson would serve as sole chief executive. Meanwhile, The Madison Square Garden Company had already taken a 12% stake in Townsquare in August 2016, linking the radio group to one of the most prominent entertainment brands in New York. Acquisition activity continued into the next decade. On the 24th of March 2022, Townsquare announced a $18.75 million deal to acquire Cherry Creek Media and all 35 of its stations. That deal closed on the 17th of June 2022, a date that marks the most recent major addition to a station portfolio that had been assembled across more than a decade of patient dealmaking.