Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Is Howard Stern worth 13 bucks a month?

At Salon, Farhad Manjoo wonders if Howard Stern is worth a subscription to Sirius radio.

On Sirius, then, Stern diehards will simply find a lot more Stern to love: They can lose themselves in Howard's world; they can dive deep into every recess of the show; and for many of them, $13 a month will be a price well worth paying. A bigger question is what all those casual, every-couple-of-days listeners, people like me, might do. Salon was kind enough to pay for my first month's Sirius subscription so that I could write this review; even if the show is much better on satellite, I'm not sure that I love Stern enough to spend that much on him from my own pocket.
I have been hearing a lot about the fact that listeners have to pay $13 a month now to hear Howard Stern. Bill O'Reilly wanted to know if he thought he was worth $13 a month. Larry King wanted to know. He insisted that he was, but he also made the point that it is not just Howard Stern to which the Sirius subscriber is subscribing. There are many, many other channels of content available from music to talk.

Sirius and XM have been building their customer bases slowly but surely for several years. On Sirius, Howard Stern could be seen as just a value-added product on a media outlet that has been gaining in popularity due to the sad state of terrestrial radio. Certainly, Howard is a huge draw. This is why Sirius was willing to pay him $100 million a year. But, if Howard Stern is all you care about, and you can't find anything else that interests you on satellite radio, then I think you need to expand your horizons.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is Howard worth $13 a month ? Is the Food Channel worth what you pay for cable ? Not the question to ask. I think Howard and all the Sirius channels combined are a bargain. What I wasn't prepared for is the number of times I had to kill the audio when a person entered my office who I felt might be sensitive to Artie Lang's inability to be creative and his crutch on gutter words. I am somehwat surprised just how much those words dumb down and dilute the bit.