Hey Now

While the DOJ passage of the Sirius-XM merger is certainly good news if you’re a satellite radio enthusiast—which may actually be like being a radio enthusiast in the age of television, since Internet radio may render satellite radio obsolete—but it does give me pause. I am a subscriber to both XM and Sirius, and for general listening, I prefer the aesthetic of the former. I worry that the new service will lose the XM panache.

It’s sad, and it’s another reminder of the incredible capacity people have to misunderstand and to underestimate the power of The Howard Stern Show. Had XM bagged The Show, Sirius would not exist today and there would be no push forward for a merger.

At the time, the dogstar network had about 650,000 subscribers compared to 2-3 million at XM. Had XM gotten The Howard Stern Show, had it not settled first for Opie and Anthony, had it understood the true nature of the situation, XM would have ruled the industry. Unaware of the transformative power of The Show, though, XM approached Mr. Stern haltingly, by his own report, while Sirius came with a sky’s-the-limit approach and bagged him.

XM’s later incredible outlay of moolah for the sluggish Oprah Winfrey channel only underlined XM’s failure to understand. There was only one true “get” for satellite, and once The Show went to Sirius, the game was over. Oprah couldn’t save it, nor Dylan nor Petty nor nor Kasem nor even a resurrected Elvis H. Presley. It’s an amazing truth in radio. The finest radio program created in the last 30 years was and is The Howard Stern Show. It is an unstoppable force and a model that should be studied and emulated by other radio professionals who want to succeed.

Stupid XM.