Oklahoma City businessman Russell Perry is expanding his urban, hip-hop broadcasting format to Georgia with the recent purchase of five stations in Augusta, he said this week.
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Perry Publishing and Broadcasting bought the stations from Radio One LLC for an undisclosed price.
Radio One is the nation's largest broadcasting company that targets black and urban listeners. It is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and owned 55 stations in 18 urban markets before the sale to Perry.
"Here is Augusta, the second-largest city in the state of Georgia with a population that is about 40 to 45 percent African-Americans, and the stations I bought are gospel, hip-hip and R&B,” Perry said. "We will change one of them to country and western.”
The Georgia stations that Perry bought are WAKB-FM, WFXA-FM, WTHB-FM, WAEG-FM and WTHB-AM.
"This purchase agreement positions Perry Publishing and Broadcasting as possibly the second-largest black-owned broadcasting company in the nation,” Perry said.
When Perry bought his first Oklahoma radio property 15 years ago, he did it to fill a niche that other broadcasters in the state were ignoring.
"I was primarily concerned about the African-American community here in Oklahoma City,” Perry said. "Nobody was playing our youngsters' music at the time. It was all basically country and western. We were so successful with it.”
From that first AM radio station that introduced hip-hop to the market full-time, Perry expanded his broadcasting properties to Tulsa and southwestern Oklahoma and now owns 11 radio stations in Oklahoma, as well as the Black Chronicle newspaper that he has long published.
Perry's daughter Velvet Perry, who lives in Georgia, will serve as general sales manager for the Augusta stations, he said.
In Oklahoma, Perry Broadcasting owns stations in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Lawton, Anadarko and Duncan. Most offer programming targeted at a black audience, although some of the Perry stations offer country and western and news-talk formats, Perry said.
Since Perry introduced full-time hip-hop format to Oklahoma, his bigger publicly traded competition that owns multiple stations in the Oklahoma City market has offered similar programming formats. Perry was inducted into the Oklahoma Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2006, said Vance Harrison, president and chief executive officer of the Oklahoma Broadcasters Association.
"I think they have found a very good business opportunity for themselves in Georgia,” Harrison said. "It's a cluster of five stations that I think they will be very successful in running.”
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