Ok, so I love Howard Stern. He’s explosive and flippant and irreverent and exploitive and sarcastic and ironic and post-modern and this is not a parody. Get it? Got it? Good. But I didn’t love him enough to follow him from traditional radio to XM Sattelite. My reasoning is pretty simple. I take BART to commute and I’m only in my car about 10 minutes a day each way and it’s not worth paying for his content for 10 minutes in the morning.
Now if as part of Howard’s new offering he made day old podcasts of his show freely downloadable to subscribers I’d subscribe in a heartbeat. I could then download his shows, put them on my cell phone and listen to them there. Especially if they had show notes where I could skip to parts of the show I was interested in (interviews, musical guests, etc.) I would bite. Earlier last month I blogged about this as well.
In addition to myself, you have to ask yourself how many others have not followed Howard over. Satellite Radio is hot, no doubt. But you have to ask yourself if Sirius’ $670 million gambit with Stern will pay off for them in the end. Although there was a lot of initial interest when Howard made his move and a lot of early sign ups, it would appear, at least from Sirius’ Alexa traffic, that their internet traffic has been dropping off the past few months. In fact, the most recent traffic data shows them back neck and neck with XM Satellite who while also growing certainly does not have to pay Howard Stern $670 or so million.
Throw in the trouble that CBS’ lawsuit is sure to bring and you wonder if Sirius really got a good deal for their money. Of course the fact that Sirius’ stock is off 25% in the past two months might also be saying something about the deal that they got in hindsight.
Hey, still though, if Stern will give me my podcasts I’d be happy to sign up.
Here’s some more analysis on the Howard Stern motivation factor for Sirius.
Thanks, illegal op!