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L. Lowry Mays, a Texas investment banker who stumbled into the radio business with the purchase of a single local station in 1972 and over the next three decades built his company, Clear Channel Communications, into the largest radio empire in the United States, died Sept. 12 at his home in San Antonio. He was 87.
His family announced his death. The cause was not immediately available. Clear Channel Communications, which was sold in a leveraged buyout in 2008, was the predecessor company to iHeartRadio.
Mr. Mays had a Harvard MBA — and more knowledge of the oil industry than broadcasting — when his first radio property, the small San Antonio station KEEZ-FM, landed in his lap. According to an account in the magazine Texas Monthly, a group of investors had persuaded Mr. Mays to co-sign a loan for the purchase of the station but defaulted, leaving him the owner.
“I had no intention of getting into the broadcast business,” Mr. Mays told Forbes in 1992.
He formed a partnership with B.J. “Red” McCombs, a car dealer who later became an owner of athletic teams including the San Antonio Spurs, the Denver Nuggets and the Minnesota Vikings, and in 1975 purchased WOAI, an AM station also based in San Antonio.
WOAI was clear or “clear channel,” meaning that no other stations could operate on its frequency. The term gave their company its name, and Clear Channel Communications, which Mr. Mays led as chairman and chief executive, went public in 1984.
From the outset, Mr. Mays was set on expansion, because with every additional radio station purchased came greater advertising reach. “I’m in the business of selling automobiles and tamales,” he told Forbes magazine in 1997. He boosted his acquisitions through investment in his sales force and cultivated audiences through promotions including on-air giveaways.
The turning point for Clear Channel, and for the modern radio industry as a whole, came with the deregulatory trend of the 1990s that culminated with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which vastly reduced restrictions on how many stations a single owner could control in a particular market.
The law precipitated consolidation across radio broadcasting, and Clear Channel Communications became the largest owner of radio stations in the country.
Among other acquisitions, the company purchased Jacor Communications in 1998 — an acquisition that included the syndicated talk shows of Rush Limbaugh and Laura Schlessinger — and AMFM in 2000. In the Washington area, Clear Channel owned music stations including DC101 and Hot 99.5 as well as sports-talk WTEM-AM.
By 2004, Clear Channel owned more than 1,200 radio stations and more than 40 television channels in the United States, as well as radio stations around the world, reaching sales of $9 billion. The company ventured into billboard advertising and concert promotion with the purchase of SFX Entertainment in 2000. It became, in the description of the New York Times, “a media empire upon which the sun never sets, from gospel radio in Greensboro, N.C., to billboards in Beijing.”
“Lowry Mays [was] the great consolidator after the Telecom Act of 1996,” said Tom Taylor, a journalist who covered the radio industry for 30 years, including as editor of the newsletter Inside Radio. “It was a time when people felt they had to get bigger or get out, and Lowry had no doubt which camp he was in. He was going to get bigger.”
Clear Channel’s dominance increasingly attracted criticism from musicians and their advocates. who argued that consolidation had snuffed out the creativity that once flourished at local radio stations and placed artists at the mercy of massive corporations for airtime.
“To those listeners who long for the days when their favorite radio station was independent, eclectic in its programming and as responsive as a tripwire to breaking local news,” Jacques Steinberg, a New York Times media reporter, wrote in 2008, “Clear Channel is nothing less than the Evil Empire.”
Don Henley, a founding member of the rock band the Eagles and a representative of the Recording Artists’ Coalition, argued before the Senate Commerce Committee in 2003 that “airwaves belong to the public, just like national forests belong to the public.” Mr. Mays, who also testified in that proceeding, defended Clear Channel as having rescued stations that might otherwise have failed and provided listeners with broader access to popular formats.
Mr. Mays suffered a blood clot in 2004 and was succeeded as chief executive by his son Mark Mays. His son Randall Mays was chief financial officer, and his daughter Kathryn Mays Johnson was senior vice president of corporate relations. (Another daughter, Linda Mays McCaul, is an oceanographer and the wife of U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican.)
In 2008, after a lengthy negotiation process, Clear Channel Communications was purchased by Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners for $17.9 billion. The radio industry was evolving beyond the era that Mr. Mays had helped define, with competition from satellite radio and streaming services.
“It was best for the family to sell and take the chips off the table,” Mr. Mays told Texas Monthly.
Lester Lowry Mays was born in Houston on July 24, 1935, and grew up in Dallas. His father, who worked in the steel industry, died in a traffic accident when Mr. Mays was 10. His mother supported him and his sister as a real estate agent and later remarried.
With plans to become a wildcatter, Mr. Mays received a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University in 1957. He later served in the Air Force, traveling to Taiwan to help supervise the construction of a pipeline for the Chinese Nationalist government in a military exchange.
He received a master of business administration degree from Harvard in 1962 before returning to Texas to work in investment banking, starting his own firm in 1970.
Mr. Mays maintained a ranch near Spring Branch, Tex., where he kept exotic animals including zebras, kudus, oryx and bongos.
He established the Mays Family Foundation and was a prolific philanthropist, giving a total of $47 million to Texas A&M, where the business school is named for him and his family. The Mays family also supported the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, whose facilities include the Lowry and Peggy Mays Clinic in Houston.
His wife of 61 years, the former Peggy Pitman, died in 2020. Besides his four children, survivors include 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Mays was a 2004 inductee of the Radio Hall of Fame. “Perhaps no one has had a greater impact on radio in the 21st century,” the citation read, “than L. Lowry Mays.”
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