There’s precedent for this: Twenty years ago this year, Howard Stern left terrestrial radio, opting for the Sirius Satellite (later Sirius XM) moneybag. Twenty years later, Howard Stern has gone from an A-list superstar to a has-been; the natural consequence of hiding behind a paywall for so long.
Without the feeder system of terrestrial radio to onboard new fans, eventually, his older fans lost interest and left, and nobody new took their place. And now Howard Stern — a man whose audience was once 20 million strong — has become a complete and total nobody.
Consider: Stern’s 1993 “Private Parts” book sold over 1.1 million copies. It was the fastest-selling title in Simon & Schuster history.
A few decades later, he released the book “Howard Stern Comes Again” (2019) with the exact same publisher, Simon & Schuster. While accurate book stats are tricky to track, in one listing, Stern’s 2019 book was credited with just 265,295 sales, finishing about 2,500 units behind Mark Levin’s seventh-ranked book title, “Unfreedom of the Press.” (There were even anecdotal reports of Stern’s book being sold at the dollar store, the tragic fate of so many over-published and under-demanded book titles.) Stern’s audience is a pitiful sliver of what it once was.
And eventually, that’ll be Stephen Colbert’s fate, too. But don’t focus on that yet: The important part is what happened after Stern announced he’d be leaving terrestrial radio (Oct. 6, 2004) but before he actually left on Dec. 16, 2005.
Stern spent much of his final months on terrestrial radio hyping up how awesome his new satellite radio show was gonna be (often by throwing shade at traditional radio). It led to a 43-page CBS lawsuit for “[misappropriating] millions of dollars’ worth of CBS Radio air time for his own financial benefit.” (The lawsuit was later settled, with Sirius paying CBS Radio a few million bucks, while also receiving rights to rebroadcast Stern’s old radio tapes.)
In retrospect, nobody at CBS should’ve been surprised: Of course Stern was gonna hype up his move to satellite! His new financial model depended on it! (Indeed, Stern later sued Sirius XM — and lost — when he demanded a payment of $300 million for the new subscribers gained via the Sirius-XM merger.)
Here we are, twenty years later, and CBS is in the same exact situation as before.
Hellbound and Down 