LISTEN: Skydance Media Offers Olive Branches to FCC; Why Steve Stoute is Variety’s Music Mogul of the Year

Skydance Media offered olive branches to the Federal Communications Commission in order to secure approval for its $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global, and those overtures achieved the desired result. On Thursday, the FCC granted its approval for the CBS-owned TV station license transfers that are crucial to closing the transaction that has been in the works for more than a year.

On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, Todd Spangler, Variety business editor, analyzes the moves Skydance made to help accelerate the FCC’s blessing of the deal. Those offerings included a reaffirmation of the decision made by Paramount Global earlier this year to eliminate its corporate divsity, equity and inclusion programs under the pressure exerted on corporate America by the Trump administration.

In a letter sent earlier in the week to the FCC, “Skydance’s general counsel, the top lawyer of Skydance reaffirmed that Skydance is committed to unbiased journalism and an embrace of diverse viewpoints. That seems innocuous,” Spangler says. “But again, keep in mind, the backdrop to this is that Paramount Global had just settled that lawsuit with Donald Trump.”

Also in the episode, Jem Aswad, Variety‘s executive editor of music, explains the reasoning that went into the selection of UnitedMasters founder Steve Stoute as Variety‘s Music Mogul of the Year.

Stoute took a circuitous route to mogul-dom. Early in his career, he had a Zelig-like experience of being in the right place (New York) in the right time (late 1980s-early ‘90s) to interact with key figures (Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige). Then he took a detour into the advertising business with the launch of Translation. Stoute’s prescient understanding that connections between artists and brands would be crucial in the future.

“I’m not sure whether he sensed the change in the wind, unlike so many other people in the music business, because the CD boom was about to die,” Aswad says of Stoute’s segue to Madison Avenue. “Napster was right around the corner and it was going to decimate the value of the music industry. So Steve pivoted into advertising. He was ahead of the trend toward branding in music, because once artists couldn’t really make money on CDs anymore, they needed something else. He was right at the forefront of that.”

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(Pictured: FCC chairman Brendan Carr, Paramount Global chair Shari Redstone and Skydance Media CEO David Ellison)