Lowry Mays, the businessman who inadvertently bought a local radio station in the early 1970s and built a media empire called Clear Channel Communications that revolutionized an entire industry, died Monday at his San Antonio home. he was 87 years old.
A representative for the Mays Family Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Mays with his wife Peggy, confirmed the death but did not give a reason.
Mays, a petroleum engineer turned investment banker, agreed to co-sign a loan to purchase KEEZ in 1972. When the original buyer pulled out, Mr. Mays and his business partner, Billie Joe McCombs, ended up owning a property that had no interest in running it, much less the experience.
But Mr. Mays also had a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University and the gift of fixing a crumbling balance sheet. He bought more stations over the next 25 years and also branched out into television in the late 1980s. He kept costs low, cash flow high, Wall Street keen to fund his every move, and ran tight operations.
When Congress deregulated the radio industry in 1996, Clear Channel was ready. Mays increased spending over the next five years, growing the business from his 40 stations in 2001 to about 1,200 stations. That’s more than three times as much as his closest competitor, Cumulus. At that time, Clear Channel controlled an estimated 10% of all radio stations. This was an amazing achievement in an industry that had until then been largely family-run.
Along the way, it swallowed up event promotion, live music, sports management, and advertising companies. By the early 2000s, Mr. Mays ruled a media empire. Artists who performed on Clear Channel stations could also perform at Clear Channel venues and advertise their concerts on Clear Channel billboards.
Thanks to Mr. Mays’ obsession with cash flow, Clear Channel became one of the best-performing companies of the 1990s, growing from $74 million in 1992 to $8 billion in 1999.
However, his success prompted a backlash. The artist claimed Clear Channel was involved in the pay-to-play arrangement. Activists have accused the business of supporting conservative voices, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war.
“Everybody gets the same McDonald’s burger,” musician Don Henley testified before Congress, and several senators accused Mays and his company.
Mr. Mays was helpless. After all, he was just a businessman, neither sentimental about the products he sold nor particularly interested in their aesthetic details.
“If someone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn’t be someone at our company,” he told Fortune in 2003. We are not in the business of providing well-researched music.We are simply in the business of selling products to our customers. “
That lack of emotion served him well a few years later when he decided to withdraw from the business entirely. but handed over most of the day-to-day operations to his sons and longtime lieutenants, Mark and Randall.
For all the changes he’s brought to the music industry, Mays has also seen more disruption coming thanks to the internet. In 2006, the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital agreed to sell the company for $17.9 billion.
Clear Channel’s fortunes changed almost immediately. It was debt-strapped, hampered by the Great Recession, plagued by changing consumer tastes, and critics said it was undermined by listeners’ distaste for the radio monoculture that Mr. Mays had spearheaded. In 2014 he started working as iHeartMedia.
Mays is known for keeping a low profile, especially as a Texas billionaire with abstained from the press. However, he did allow the occasional interview, including a brief conversation with his Texas Monthly in 2018.
When asked why he sold Clear Channel, he simply replied, “It would have been best for the family to sell and take the chips off the table.”
Lester Laurie Mays was born in Houston on July 24, 1935 and grew up in the Dallas suburbs. His father, steel executive Lester T. Mays, Laurie died in a car accident when she was 10, and her mother, Virginia (Laurie) Mays, sold the property to support the family.
Mr. Mays studied petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University and spent summers working on an oil rig. He graduated in 1957 and joined the Air Force, overseeing the construction of oil pipelines in Taiwan. This was his experience managing 10,000 people and gave him his first experience of running a large organization.
He married Peggy Pittman in 1959. She passed away in her 2020. 16 grandchildren; and 3 great-grandchildren.
After earning an MBA from Harvard University in 1962, Mr. Mays returned to Texas and worked for an investment firm for eight years before starting it in 1970.
He proved himself to be an accomplished businessman. To attract investors for a San Antonio photofinishing company, he hired a boy to remove the license plates of every car in the developer’s parking lot. I had him write it down and hired another boy to get the addresses of all the motor vehicle license plates. Mr. Mays then sent a letter of invitation to each address.
Shortly after acquiring KEEZ in 1972, he founded the San Antonio Broadcasting Company, which changed its name to Clear Channel in 1975. He understood the great potential of Talk His radio better than anyone and switched several of his early acquisitions to the format. Many observers credit him with Clear Channel for sparking the conservative talk show craze in the 1990s.
Even as the company grew rapidly, Mays insisted his goal was neither market dominance nor growth itself. In an industry full of outsized personalities, both on stage and in the boardroom, he has thrived on being quiet and even boring.
In 2000, he told The New York Times: