A deal is in place that will send Urban KBLX-FM from troubled Inner City Broadcasting and into the open arms of the local Entercom radio station cluster. Entercom says it will move forward with the station’s format intact.
Entercom already has an FM presence in the market: popular music outlet 96.5 KOIT-FM, sports The Game 95.7 KGMZ-FM and classic rock station 98.5/102.1 KUFX-FM.
The deal to acquire KBLX out of bankruptcy will go down in the books with a value of $25M. A TBA is expected to begin later this month.
Entercom’s President and CEO David Field stated: “We could not be more pleased to add KBLX-FM to our San Francisco radio line-up. KBLX is the leading urban radio station in the San Francisco market and has a long history of producing distinctive and compelling programming. The addition of KBLX strengthens our competitive positioning in San Francisco and enhances our ability to provide outstanding content to our listeners and broad audience reach and effective marketing opportunities to our advertisers.”
The station is a Class B on 102.9 MHz, with 6.6 kW @ 1.289’. Its main contour gets all of San Francisco proper, and it ropes in San Jose to the southeast with its secondary contour.
Here are some metrics on the station provided by Hoffman Schutz’s David Schutz: The station’s transmitter is at Bruno Mountain, not the Sutro Tower, and is fully competitive with other big FMs. It reaches over 4.5M people with its 60 dBu signal, resulting in a $5.54 popultaion metric. Schutz says it came in #16 in the February Arbitron rankings.
RBR-TVBR observation: Can you imagine getting a Class B FM in a top ten market for this price in 1998? We didn’t think so.
