Brett Pulley, 18 October
Forbes

Lowry Mays built clear channel into the Evil Empire of radio and
entertainment. Now his son has to make nice.

L. Lowry Mays is a Texan's Texan, rock-ribbed, 6 foot 2 and larger than
life. He started out as an investment banker; in 1972, when a client he was
advising backed out of a deal to buy an FM radio station in San Antonio,
Tex., Mays partnered with a pal and did the deal himself, paying $125,000.
In the three decades since, he has built one of the largest and most
powerful media companies in the nation, Clear Channel, a much-maligned giant
that, in the view of its enemies, is just too damned big for anyone else's
good.

Its tentacles stretch into myriad reaches of media and pop culture. Clear
Channel owns 1,202 radio stations in 49 states, more than any other company;
each week it reaches 100 million listeners, one-third more than its closest
rival(Viacom). It also owns 36 TV stations and the world's biggest
outdoor-advertising company, with 770,000 billboards, 150,000 of them in the
U.S. that can be seen by 56% of the country's adults in a day. It controls
105 live-entertainment venues, hosting 32,000 performances each year and
drawing 70 million people. In the first half of this year Clear Channel sold
nearly 10 million concert tickets, more than three times the gate of any
competitor. Many of those gigs were booked by the largest concert promotions
firm in the U.S., a Clear Channel unit.

"They are the poster child for the evils of media consolidation," says
Jonathan Rintels, who heads the Center for Creative Voices in Media in
Washington,D.C. Adds Jay Rosenthal, counsel for the Recording Artists'
Coalition, which lobbies against the company: "Clear Channel owns so many
radio stations and concert venues that artists are constantly fearful of
it." Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), the popular populist, filed a bill that
would force Clear Channel to break apart some of its businesses.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/1018/106_print.html