Howard Stern’s Replacements and the Death of Radio
Infinity Broadcasting Corp., finally revealing its plans to replace the self-proclaimed “King of All Media,” announced a new morning drive time lineup Tuesday of assorted hosts for its 27 soon-to-be former Stern stations. Rather than turning to a single replacement, Infinity offered a variety of names for different markets.
The end is near for radio, folks. This isn’t the first shot, nor will it be the last, but radio as we know it is dying at an accelerating rate.
Before you peg me as just another loud-mouthed Howard Stern fan who believes every bit of his hype, I will head you off at the pass. I am a former Howard Stern fan. I got bored with him. Now I am an XM Satellite Radio fan. I have seen the other side of the mountain and this desolate valley that terrestrial radio has slowly dropped itself into, is barren, cold and boring.
On the other side there is uncensored talking, a la Howard Stern at Sirius and Opie and Anthony at XM. There is more music, including channels for all the decades as well as genre-based stations. They have news channels. They have sports packages for the NFL, MLB and the NHL so you can listen to your favorite sports teams no matter where you live around the United States. They even have traffic stations for most major metropolitan areas.
Meanwhile, all terrestrial radio can do is continue to play tons of commercials, continue to automate their formats (JACK FM Anyone?) and pretend that anyone cares about High Definition Radio. They are walking themselves right off the plank to a shark-infested sea of media irrelevancy. It is true that satellite radio costs money, but so does our cable and satellite television. I am sure there were many skeptics who thought nobody was going to pay to watch television. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
The same thing will happen with radio, only it will be worse. Companies like Infinity Broadcasting aren’t going to survive like NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX did. They were included on your satellite and cable TV packages, but none of the satellite radio companies are looking to sign up Infinity terrestrial radio stations for their content. They don’t need them. They are too busy stealing people like Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony and a whole host of terrestrial radio personality castoffs that love music and program channels better than some machine ever could.
As for terrestrial radio’s last ditch effort at competing on quality with hi-def, they are missing the boat. The record industry just finished learning this lesson. While they were arguing over the format for future music and whether it should be one of two super high quality standards like SACD or DVD Audio, the consumers were busy sacrificing the quality throughout their entire media collections to take the convenience route and convert their collections to MP3’s.
In the case of hi-def radio, the level of quality will never be enough to outweigh the convenience of listening to music without commercials and without those impossibly infinitesimal playlists. Throw a little uncensored, unregulated talk radio on top of it all and you have a clear view of the death of radio as we know it.
At least that is what I think. Then again, maybe this little rant will sound a lot like the people who were pimping the Mini-disc, Betamax and Laserdisc technologies of yesteryear.
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9 Responses to “Howard Stern’s Replacements and the Death of Radio”
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i want to know two things
1) how did you post this at 5:55pm if its only 5:10 here and you live 5 minutes from me.
2) if traditional radio is “terrestrial”, does that make XM & Sirius “extra-terrestrial”? That alone scares me.
How is XM surviving when some of the music is censored? I am under the impression (some guy working for Sirius told me) that XM is owned (not PWN3D!!!!) by clearchannel, the axis of evil in all communication related thingers.
I, for one, will probably not be jumping on the satellite bandwagon anytime soon. I don’t spend nearly enough time listening to music for it to be worthwhile. Unless of course i can get XM/sirius broadcast on my pc without my broadband connection so i can use it at work. then i’m sold.
First of all, XM Radio is available online.
Second of all, Clear Channel doesn’t own XM. They were an early investor in the company, but their holdings are really far from being enough to say they “own” it. They aren’t even an influence in the running of the company.
That was just a bunch of stuff that Stern spewed because he wants people to follow him to Sirius.
How much debt did XM and Sirius take on to get those satellites up and how many subscribers do they need to break even?
I am not sure what the answer to that question is, but I can tell you that Sirius has just over 2,000,000 subscribers and XM has just over 5,000,000.
I have also read in press releases for one of the companies that they expect to break even in 2007. Who knows how realistic that is though.
I think satellite radio is cool, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’ve solved a simple problem with a ridiculously expensive and complex solution. In a world with an Internet, it seems kind of silly to launch rockets and distribute proprietary radio receivers to transmit audio.
Satellites have to be used at some point for the kind of geographical expanse. it is my understanding that in cities they use repeaters and stuff like that. What else would you have them do to broadcast audio to cars driving around the entire US?
The cell infrastructure might be a place to start.
That is a decent idea for metro areas, but my question is how well does that work in the middle of Montana, or Nebraska? One of the big markets for Satellite radio are the truck drivers and they and others who live in remote areas appreciate the fact that they can get the same service everywhere.
I’d be interested to know what their income statements would look like if they had 1) ignored the truckers and piggybacked on the existing cell system, 2) skipped the satellites and built out the cell system to Bumblefook Montana, or 3) used all the money they borrowed to put the satellites up to buy enough politicians to do away with the prudish FCC laws. I don’t know the answer to any of those, but it would be interesting.