Change is in the air at Sirius/XM
Some of you know the Fox Talk Radio was removed, but they seem to be steering away from all Toxic Talk
Channel 128 was The Power
http://www.siriusxm.com/urbanview
The channel has been renamed Urban View – implicitly equating African American with people who live in cities. Gone are indicted lawyer Warren Ballentine and Rob Redding (he can be heard on GCN). Replacing them are Republican Armstrong Williams and a “cooking show”. Al Sharpton and Joe Madison remain.
Part of the problem is once you are “the man”, you can’t fight The Man. It seems that Black History month is pretty muted this year.
Change is coming and the stock price is rising. Sirius was behind XM and paid big bucks to sign Howard Stern, and other high powered on air talent like Cousin Brucey for the 60s channel, Jimmy Walker for the 70s channel, and the entire original MTV VJ team still living for the 80s channel. They got instant market share and then took over XM with its lower cost talent.
Without XM as competition but with real competition from podcasts and iHeart Radio, Sirius is cutting costs. Howard Stern reportedly took a pay cut, and Sirius is less willing to pay any price to keep the talent and programming from XM.
You may be right about a goal of less controversy, but I it is secondary at best.
SiriusXM has gross revenue of about $300 million a month and a net after taxes of $50 million. Sirius is far from saturating their potential market – investing more money in better programming is clearly the way to go – and will further point out what a dismal slum Cumulus and Clear Channel are turning radio into.
To overuse my Krispy Kreme analogy, when you have a product with a huge gross profit margin, the last thing you want to do is cut $.01 out of the cost of the product or give people two day old donuts to save labor costs. You should be trying to figure out how to sell more donuts – sales, advertising, cross promotion, spend money to improve the product. The money you borrowed and have to pay interest on is fixed – if you sell fewer donuts, the interest becomes a larger and larger cost burden on each donut you do sell.
You have to spend money to make money
I agree with what you wrote… and Sirius has some of the best people in the business doing what they do. Some great DJs that know a tremendous amount and can put together great programs.
To your point, with Cumulus and Clear Channel turning radio into a slum, there is less need for Sirius to pay as much as they do to keep their talent. If Fox Talk Radio wants to stream into cars, who can they go to? …and why aren’t they paying Sirius for their advertiser sponsored programs the same way that the infomercials pay WABC?
Would the King of All Media leave Sirius to join TheBlaze or GCN? Maybe but I think he likes being less censored and doesn’t miss the FCC fines?
I watched as much as I could take of a video of Howard Stern telling his crew about his decision to keep working for Sirius. It was just uploaded last month, but my sense is it was from a while ago – I don’t follow Sterm closely enough to know.
He made the same point I have a few times – I view Sirius as a transition from AM/FM to something else, probably using their network of ground stations for digital multiplexing, or perhaps 4g cellular towers doing multicasting. As wireless broadband is maturing, the value of having a satellite becomes less and less. The latency, capacity and reliability of the Internet continues to improve.
Radio is going to have the same ultimate fate as TV – ESPN is already adding a rewind feature to their live radio stream. Dar.fm has been playing with a TiVo like system for radio. When there is an effective way to skip forward 30 seconds, the meadow muffin hits the fan
I was looking at SIRI’s financials – it costs them $54 to sign up a subscriber. For people who buy a new car and find a Sirius radio installed, 44% of them become paying subscribers.
So, where do programs and podcasts e.g. ‘The American Whore’ come into focus? Are not these the programs of the future? What about the ‘doughnut hole? Help me out here, surely Capitalism is under assault. I am totally confused.
…”You have to spend money to make money.”
Art, you need to take over Cumulus, they suck. I’d like to buy a local radio station and run the cumulus ass’s into the ground. Funny/sad thing is they are doing it themselves, LOL
People don’t even get updated local school closing data from them cause there is no one at the station! you can tell cause they are running a ‘canned’ pre-recorded weather forecast. dorks
parrott
A little bit of canned doesn’t bother me. What does is tuning in on a Sunday and hearing a weekend forecast that included the Saturday just past. I have actually heard that… and commercials for events that occurred the day before. I understand how and why it happens, but it is still annoying to me.
You got that Right CC1s121LrBGT ! Music and commercial playing at the same time (for hours and sometimes days at a time)
is classic Cumulus, LOL
Parrott
Perhaps they are playing to the audience that used to watch “The Wizard of Oz” with the sound turned down and “They Dark Side of the Moon” audio cranked up and synchronized to the movie classic?
Another similar annoyance – stations that carry “local news”, but every hour for the entire day it’s the same news – “yesterday an ice cream truck collided with a blue 2003 Toyota Camry driven by Mary Johnson, who was taken by EMS to Mount Mother of Holiness Hospital’. First, it’s fairly obvious they’re just rewriting the local newspaper without attribution, and who cares unless you know Mary Johnson? (admittedly in a small town you do)… But correct me if I’ve misunderstood the concept, but isn’t news supposed to be “new”?