People News
Howard Stern's 'Sirius' career blooms
By Stone Martindale
Jan 7, 2007, 18:50 GMT

Love him or hate him, the one thing even his biggest media critics agree on, no one is as sincerely disarming during interviews like Howard Stern.  He beats the Billy Bush, Access Hollywood pap crowd hands down in getting celebrities to reveal truths about themselves. 

This gift is paying off in Sirius stock buzz, which Business Week reports:..."Wednesday, Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. took center stage as investors got a chance to respond to Tuesday's news that the broadcast home of Howard Stern topped more than 6 million subscribers, 82 percent more than it had the prior year."

Howard Stern left CBS radio in a lucrative move to Sirius Satellite Radio, he also left many of his terrestrial radio listeners behind.  But ask him, he's not worried, the land lubbers will switch over to satellite if you ask him.

"Radio had stopped being fun for me and now it is again," Stern recently said about his new world, free from FCC content restrictions. "This will save radio."

CBS has suffered revenue dips, and ill fated personality investments such as ex Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth, hired to replace Stern on WFNY, who didn't pan out too well.

Not everyone is pessimistic for the terrestrial radio wasteland that has been left in Stern's wake.  Satellite skeptics have noted XM and Sirius still have only captured a small fraction of the 224 million "free" radios in the country.

According to the New York Daily News:  "Howard's in a golden cage," says Tom Taylor, editor of the trade magazine Inside Radio. "He's doing very well for himself and for Sirius, but you don't hear as much about him as you used to. From the radio industry perspective, he's very much off the radar."

"Satellite is doing great," says Eric Logan, XM executive vice president of programming. "We're a company with 7.6 million paying subscribers and close to a billion dollars in revenue, which are not numbers you can ignore." Reported the Daily News.

Brand name content like Stern, the NFL and Martha Stewart are paid well for their unique brand of content and core audience who will tune in. 

Radio consultants and industry insiders tout the future of radio morphing into an infinite smorgasbord of choices for today's listeners. 

Citing wireless broadband, the possiblity to hear broadcasts from all over the world will most definitely open up.  The question is, will people have the patience to sift through all the audio clutter?