TechDirt article
Searching For Howard Stern's Lost Listeners
from the and-like-that...-they-vanished dept
For all the hype surrounding Howard Stern's move to Sirius radio, only a small fraction of his drive-time listeners actually signed up for Sirius subscriptions (though, clearly, enough to keep both Stern and Sirius pretty happy). At the same time, his "replacements" at CBS Radio have an even smaller fraction of his old listening audience, meaning that everyone's searching for Howard Stern's millions of lost listeners. Mostly, people seem to think those listeners gravitated to other, more established, local shock jocks -- while another bunch jumped to NPR (yes, NPR). Still, for all the talk about how the Stern jump would kill terrestrial radio and save satellite radio, it doesn't appear that all that many people came with him. What's most interesting, though, is how confused the entire industry seems to be about all of this. Stern was such a giant in the industry that no one seemed to have any clue what would actually happen when he jumped ship -- and now that it's happened, they're still struggling to figure out where everyone went.