Sebastian Maniscalco ‘Raw Dog’ Controversy, Radio Rotations, and Comics’ Royaltie

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Featured: Sebastian Maniscalco, Jamie Foxx, Liz Mealy, Shane Gillis, Jim Gaffigan, Kevin Hart, Brian Regan, George Carlin

What’s in This Episode

• Sebastian Maniscalco Raw Dog channel controversy
• Raw Dog radio station rotation changes and artist roster reduction
• Comedy radio programming strategy and playlist rotation
• Stand Up For Stand Up data analysis on spin counts
• Jamie Foxx new special release
• Comics’ royalties and licensing issues

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Hey there, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Little housekeeping. This technically is the bonus episode. Normally, the regular episode comes out at 3 a.m. And if I do a bonus, I do it at noon.

I’m going to flip that today. So if you’re looking for the regular episode, that’ll be out on noon Eastern on Wednesday. This is the bonus episode. Because I want to talk more about Sebastian Maniscalco, Raw Dog Gate. This is a big deal.

I’m going to play some more clips from big-name comedians. Sebastian is just going to have to do something about this. It is currently 3.57 p.m. On Tuesday afternoon as I record this piece here. So part of the stress for me is I can’t be near my computer on Wednesday morning.

I have a commitment that I have to do So that’s why I’ve flipped the episodes, because the regular episode where I tell you about Jamie Foxx’s new special out today, that’ll hold. So you can get that at noon. But I’m a little concerned that if I schedule this and wait too late in the day, Sebastian will have reacted to this and this whole thing will be dated. And I want to be fair to the guy. Now, I think this is a very, very easy win for Sebastian.

All he has to do is go, hey, wow, I heard you guys and didn’t realize. And oh, my goodness, I feel so bad. Yeah, of course we want to play comedians. As the former program director of the Raw Dog channel, as I mentioned yesterday for newer listeners, I was vice president of comedy and entertainment for Sirius XM over a decade ago. So I absolutely have some expertise on this subject for me when I program the channel.

It was a mix of hits and discovery, as we call it. So back in 2008 or so, maybe we were playing a lot of Dean Cook and Jeff Dunham, but we would play people maybe you didn’t know, like a Hannibal Buress, somebody like that, and mix them in. The value proposition was come for the hits and then trust us, we know what’s happening in comedy. I personally don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to play comedians like somebody like Liz Mealy, who’s in the center of this. She’s fantastic.

Why wouldn’t you play Liz Mealy? Why wouldn’t you have a station that plays someone like Liz Mealy or Gianmarco Ceresi or people like that? Why wouldn’t you play these people? I don’t understand it at all. But you would have to ask the current programmers there.

Anyway, there’s a website, standupforstandup.org. They’ve done some research on this. According to that website, total spins per month, barely moved all year. Between 7,800 and 9,400 clips. When I programmed the channel, we tried to aim for like five minute clips.

If you did clips that were too short, it just cluttered up the radio station. And if you had a bit that was like too long, it slowed down the radio station. So we aimed for around five, always trying to keep the integrity of the bit. But as a comedian, if you had an album with a bunch of 90 second tracks, we just didn’t schedule them because of the clutter issue.

Also, if you had an 11 minute bit, like Eddie Murphy, The Barbecue, that just…

I’d have to do the math on if you play a five-minute clip, so that would be 12 an hour, 24 hours a day, 30 days a month. You do the math, you probably wind up with a number around 7,800 to 9,400. Standupforstandup.org says what changed is how many different acts split that number. The active roster shrank by roughly 66% as the channel rebrand took hold from a high of 812 acts in April to 275 in September. Let me talk to you about radio programming really quickly.

I’m going to do this very quickly. If you’re a radio expert, you can poke holes in my argument, but I’m going to teach this very simply the way I teach it to college students for the first time when they’re learning about music rotations. Let’s have Three categories, A, B, and C. A is going to be hits. B is going to be things that were popular, say, six months ago.

C is going to be classics. What we do is we have a smaller pool of comedians or songs in A, a bigger pool in B, and then C is a big slow rotation. So say you did play a George Carlin bit. Well, George hasn’t put anything new out in 15, 20 years now. So Carlin would go in C, think of C as classic, and maybe somebody who’s hot right now, if you had a Shane Gillis clip, you would put Shane in A.

The difference between music radio and comedy radio is in music radio, you don’t mind hearing the same song over and over if you really like the song, especially if it’s new. In comedy, once you hear something, you’ve heard it, and you never laugh the same way as hard the second time. So the analog is basically a comedy library will have 10 times as many songs. So think of a comedy clip as a song. And in terms of licensing, they are effectively songs.

They are sound recordings is the term. You may have heard the term top 40 radio. So maybe in comedy, you might have 400, whereas you had 40. Because you don’t add one song, you usually add a new album. If Shane Gillis put out a new album, I wouldn’t add just track one from Shane Gillis’s album, I would add the entire album.

Does that make sense? In terms of how many artists you were playing? I don’t know if I ever really factored that in. When you use the automatic music scheduler, you do have to have there’s a concept called artist separation. For example, if you just played Shane Gillis, you don’t want to play Shane Gillis again in the next five minutes, 10 minutes, probably not again for a few hours.

So you tell the computer, OK, separate the artist Shane Gillis from itself with I think we had a three hour rule back in the day. But I more looked at the number of total clips available rather than total artists. The current programmers may have a different opinion. Standup for Standup.org say there were 812 playing in April, 275 in September. They say June 2026 saw shift.

That month, nearly half the names on the top 100 list were swapped out and spin shifted towards a much smaller rotation featuring more famous performers receiving heavier rotation. So I’m going to call up their website now. They have a graph there. March 2026-before. And according to this, in March 2026, Jim Jeffries had 90 spins.

Pete Correale, who co-hosts the Sebastian Maniscalco podcast, was number two with 86. Hannah Gadsby with 84 spins. Florentine with 78. Adrienne Appalucci with 74. Liz Mealy with 74.

Mike Vecchione with 73. Chad Daniels with 71. Ian Edwards, 67. And at number 10, Gianmarco Soresi at 64. Now, according to this data, I haven’t checked it.

I have no reason not to believe their data. Of those 10 I just read you, Hannah, Florentine, Adrian, Liz, Mike Vecchione, Ian Edwards, and Gianmarco Soresi are out of current rotation. Chad Daniels, Pete Correale, and Jim Jeffries still in. In September, which is the new format, StandUpForStandUp.org says number one in spins, Jim Gaffigan with 183 spins. Now, I program currently the comedy offerings for the Live One app.

I can assure you, Jim Gaffigan is quite popular, and my audience shows no sense of Jim Gaffigan fatigue, so I don’t think it’s absurd to play a lot of Jim Gaffigan. Number two, Kevin Hart. Same note, 181 spins. Number three, Brian Regan, 175. Corey Elliott, 173 at number four.

Again, Corey Elliott is the co-host of the Sebastian podcast. Number five, Cat Williams. Mark Normand at number six with 171. Jimmy Carr, then Dan Soder. Gary Goleman, and Jamie Foxx, interestingly enough.

That surprises me. Jamie doesn’t have all that much comedy, and I say that. I know he has a new special out today, and he recently did a comedy special, but I used to program the Foxhole comedy station for Jamie Foxx. Jamie Foxx does not have a lot of recorded comedy, so I don’t know how they’re getting up to 164 spins for Jamie Foxx, but okay. If you’re curious, the next five names are Gervais, Bo Burnham, Chris Rock, Louis C.K.

Martin Lawrence. In terms of play the hits, and in all formats, you should play the hits. Again, Gaffigan, Kevin Hart, Regan, Correale, Cat, Mark Norman, Jimmy Carr, Soder, Goldman, Jamie Foxx, Gervais, Burnham, Chris Rock, Louis C.K. Martin Lawrence. Not absurd for the category of, say, A for hits.

What’s missing here is the depth. In my opinion, when I had the radio station, I wanted it to be interesting, and I think it’s more interesting.. Sure, let’s play some Kevin Hart, but let’s also play some Liz Mealy, or let’s also play some, I’m just looking at what they used to play, let’s play some David Drake, let’s play some Nicole Birch, let’s play some Nick Callis. Vulture wrote about this. They say, on October 5th, comedians like Pat Noswalt, Michelle Wolfe, Matthew Broussard, dozens of others, we’ll hear from some in a second, took to social media, et cetera, well covered here.

According to these videos, royalties earned from radio play on raw comedy, and again, I brought this up yesterday, It’s interesting to me that everyone is referring to this thing as raw dog, not raw comedy. When I programmed it, it was called Raw Dog Comedy Uncensored. In my last month or so there, the bosses made me change it to Raw Dog Comedy Hits. In my opinion, that was a mistake. Apparently, after I stopped paying attention, they went back to playing more depth and not just doing the hits.

So I think they saw the error of their ways. But now they’ve gone back to doing a hits format with Sebastian. You’d have to ask them. Vulture says royalties earned from radio play on raw comedy approximately $ 15 per spin. Have been a vital source of income for middle-class comedians for a year.

In my experience, when we first started, if we played a comedian, like the first six months, all we heard was, you’re stealing my material!

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And then they found out about the royalties part of it.

We weren’t stealing your material. You had entered them into SoundExchange, and we were using the SoundExchange system to play the material that you had submitted to SoundExchange, or your people had, and now you’re getting royalties. I had one comedian, you’ve heard of this person! You definitely have heard of this person. Thank me personally, because he had gotten a check for $ 80, 000.

This was a big-name comedian. He was very nice to me. Stand Up for Stand Up says the active roster of comedians platformed on the channel has shrunk by roughly 66%, from a high of 812 acts in April to 275 in September. 75% of the plays are concentrated among the top 50 of those artists. Many of whom are famous. We just covered the list.

How are we doing on time? Okay, we’re getting a little long. Let me take the break and I’ll come back and I’ll play a bunch of clips for you.

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All right, let’s hear from a bunch of comedians.

I’m going to play a bunch of comedians reacting to this. You’ve heard of these people in a row. I’m going to play Mark Maron, Dean Cook, Mark Normand, Dan Soder, Brian Posehn, and Todd Barry. I’m just going to play all of those back to back to back. Now, unlike yesterday’s episode, for this, I’ve had to make..

They’re not edits. Just yesterday, I was playing clips that I pulled from threads. Today is a clips I pulled from Instagram, and because of the way I have to capture them, I may have had to clip the beginning of the audio. It’s just a long, boring story, but the audio ripper I use.. You have to actually click on an Instagram video, but if you do that, it stops the audio ripper.

So just trust me, nothing nefarious here, but I’m just being transparent. I may have resized their video and I may have clipped a little bit of the audio, but the spirit of what they say is intact here. So here’s Marin, Dean Cook, Mark Norman, Dan Soder, Brian Posehn, and Todd Berry. So listen, there’s a few ways that comics can make money. They can be on a TV show, they can tour, they can host things, but One of the most steady income streams for a comedian, if they have recorded material, is on Sirius XM’s Raw Dog.

And I make a little cash from that. A lot of comics. Hundreds of people make residuals from being played on satellite radio on Sirius on the Raw Dog station. Sebastian Maniscalco has taken over that station. And apparently a lot of people are losing their airtime, which means they’re losing a lot of income that they need.

As working class comics. So this is sort of a plea and a request for Sebastian to make room and give all those comics their airtime back. Talking today about the situation with Raw, the comedy channel, formerly Raw Dog, which then became the Sebastian Maniscalco channel on SiriusXM. Okay, long story short, there’s a lot of comedians that really depend on not only the revenue stream that’s generated during, let’s call it the lean years or time when maybe you’re taking care of family, taking care of responsibilities. And for one reason or another, that’s like passive income that makes things less passive when you’re off the road and looking to make ends meet.

So listen, Sebastian, we’re coming for you. There’s no way to say it other than We’re all here, and we’re coming to your house right now. Fix it. No. I love Sebastian.

He’s a good friend of mine, and I love SiriusXM, and I think they’re going to do the right thing, which is revert the channel back to what it was. You can still find space for Maniscalco and all things Maniscalco, or maybe there is a way to actually sort of help each other. Sebastian, I’m sure you could spotlight a lot of people, and those comics will then Always appreciate that you. Looked out for them. So that’s what I’m on here to just express.

And I acknowledge that this is something that’s good for all stand-ups. And it’s absolutely mission critical for the health and wellness of so many comics that take the roll of dice and take the gamble in this career and realize that sometimes that sacrifice is going to come You know, with an ebb and a flow that’s not easy to always jive with. So do what’s right. Please, please, please. If you’re listening, Sirius XM, please do the right thing.

And I know Sebastian’s a good dude and he’s going to do the right thing regardless. One other thing while I have you. The Coconut Grove Improv still owes me a bonus Sunday night show that I added back in 2008. And I’m not going to lie to you. I’m pissed.

So can somebody, I know it’s defunct and it no longer exists, but if somebody could get back in touch with me from the improv chain, maybe we could work that out. And you know what? I’ll even break off a third for the 800 comedians that are relying on the raw channel residuals. All right. I’m going to bed.

Make this right. When I wake up, I want everybody to be happy. Please. Sirius XM. Remember old Sirius?

Lord knows I don’t. Well, they’re still around, and they used to have a great channel called Raw Dog, and now that’s been given to Sebastian, and, uh, so they had like 800 comedians on there that they would spin, and, you know, they were famous, not famous, little everything, and now it’s down to 300 famous comics, and I’m talking famous, like Joan, huh, Norm, hey, you know, I like all these guys. George Carlin. Great, great. All great comics, but they’re dead.

They’re all dead. So where’s that money going? I think it’s a way for Sirius to not cough up the dough. Pretty good. So let’s get Raw Dog back.

I don’t know if Sebastian had anything to do with it or whatever. If he knew he was screwing over a bunch of people, I doubt it. But why not get him back? That’s a great way for you to find out about a new comic, learn about a guy or a gal you like, and you’re on a road trip, and you go, this is great, I’ve got to look this person up. So, yeah.

These guys have had it too good for too long, these dead comics. So, let’s get Raw Dog back, and please make fun of my hair in the comments. Thank you. Comedy. What it is, is it’s comics coming together to talk about SiriusXM’s Raw Dog Radio.

Raw Dog Radio was a very important.. Source of income for a lot of comics. It played over 800 comics and it’s comics, you know, comics you love, but more importantly, comics you’ve never heard of, or maybe comics that you’ve never ran across and it would play their jokes and it would pay them. So it helped a lot of people make rent and made a lot of people help with like, you know, food and that kind of stuff. And recently Sebastian Maniscalco, one of the greats, one of the top working comics took over the channel.

And since they took it over, they stopped playing a lot of comics. They started playing very famous comics. If you’ve ever been to a comedy club and looked at the menu, it’s probably a comic that they have a drink named after, you know, it’s probably like the Joan Rivers martini or the Bernie Mac and cheese. It’s just people like that. It’s like very famous comics who are dead or who don’t necessarily need the money.

So this video is just asking Sebastian, to please reconsider and return Raw Dog Radio to what it was, which was a great source of income for the comedy community. Not just one individual comedian, but all the comedians. So Sebastian, if you see this, we love you, dude. You know, I’ve met you. You’re a sweetheart of a guy, an awesome comic.

Please just reconsider and start booking the channel the way it was. You know, help out a lot of comedians. Because you don’t want.. You don’t want to look greedy. You don’t want to look like you’re not helping out comics.

And more importantly, you got a lot of catchphrases that can be used against you. And I don’t think, you know, you don’t want to see a bunch of, why did you, aren’t you embarrassed? You took away their rent money. I’m just saying Sebastian, one comic to another, please reconsider having raw dog radio, uh, restored to the way it was to help out the community. Um, And I promise you this is the last front-facing video you’ll see from me for a while.

Hopefully. Along with my brothers and sisters in stand-up comedy, I, too, support all of them that are fighting against this latest thing to happen to work in comics. You know, it’s been a rough couple of years for people.. That just make money off stand-up and their live dates and people that don’t have support of these massive streaming stations and whatever. There’s a lot of people that feed families and cats and dogs and themselves just off what they make performing around the country.

And a lot of them were living off this extra money from streaming services and, you know, having jokes get on Sirius. And that helped them, you know, by having they got money from that, which they should. But then they also got people to find out about them and hear them and go, oh, I heard that dude on Raw Dog. I’m going to go see him or I’m going to buy his record or, you know, go to a record store, which I still do, and buy a comedy record. That happens.

And now it won’t. So not only do those people not get any money from Raw Dog because of Sebastian Maniscalco, which God bless him. He’s been working, you know, I don’t know if he’s been doing it as long as I have. I’ve been doing it almost 40 years, but I know he’s been in the trenches for a long time and he should have respect for all the other people that do the same thing that he did for so long and don’t have the success that he has yet, you know? And, uh, Sirius XM, you know, I pay, I subscribe cause I love the metal stations and I love, don’t worry about what other stations I listened to.

But anyway, um, I support Sirius XM and, and I’ve also enjoyed getting money from, um, my stuff being played on there and it’s not going to be played on raw dog anymore. And luckily I have other, uh, forms of income, but a lot of comics don’t. And, uh, this situation sucks. So I hope somebody, Sebastian or Sirius, I hope you change your mind and, uh, How about this? How about a show called Sebastian Presents Up and Comers?

Do like what Tiffany Haddish does and what other people do where they support other comics and use their name to do that. Positive. That’s something cool to do. Instead of just making more money and then making it so no one else makes money. That’s not positive.

That’s something else. Hey, it’s Todd Barry. I’m wearing a black shirt. So you know it’s about to get serious. Serious?

I didn’t even mean to make that little coincidental homonym thing. I was asked to make a video about the whole Sebastian Maniscalco thing. Comics were asked to do that, and they were supposed to do it at noon today. It’s 7 p.m. Now, so I’m guessing Sebastian’s got the message.

And I’m sure people who’ve been scrolling videos all day have gotten the message. So you know the bullet points of what’s going on with this situation. And I just hope it gets resolved because these comedians, I saw a post from a comedian I know, and she said like a third of her income comes from royalties. So that’s a lot of money. And not everyone is as fortunate as me who plays opera houses exclusively and stadiums.

And the occasional half-full rock club. Or the occasional quarter-filled rock club. Or the occasional canceled show because no one bought a ticket. Now, that doesn’t happen in a while. Anyway, I’m aware that I have a nose hair situation, but I literally..

I just went around the corner to my bathroom. I don’t know why I need to tell you where my bathroom is. And I clipped them, then I clipped them again, and I still see them. Anyway. Sebastian, I’ve never actually met you.

I saw you in Montreal years ago, and I watched your set, and you’re excellent. And when you walked off, I said, that was great. You gave me a thank you. So that’s the extent of our relationship. But I think I’ve heard you’re a great guy, and I hope that this gets resolved and people can start making some money again.

But to reiterate, I play opera houses and stadiums exclusively. And I am for the theaters. Is that how you say that? All right. Good night, everyone.

As I voice this section, it is 4.11 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, October 6th. I’m on website XM Playlist, and I have selected Sebastian’s channel. The most recent bit they played was by Pete Correale. Before that, Martin Lawrence, Neil Brennan, Craig Ferguson, Nikki Glaser.

Then the Sebastian Maniscalco show was on. Somebody brought up to me that they’ve renamed that, that it used to be called Pete and Sebastian, the Pete being Pete Correale.

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And now it’s the Sebastian Maniscalco show with Pete Correale.

I wonder how the gator feels about that one. I will have to ask him what next time I see him. Paul Verzi was played at 2.53 p.m. Nate Bregazzi, Mark Ellis, Bernie Mac, Yakov Smirnoff, Seinfeld, Joe Coy, Jamie Foxx, what appears to be a clip from Sebastian’s show, Big J, and Bob Hope. Now, believe me, I’m a huge Bob Hope fan.

I programmed the Radio Classics channel in two different stints for Sirius and then SiriusXM. I did pop-up stations with the Bob Hope estate. I had lovely conversations with Linda Hope. Somewhere in the archives is me talking with Linda Hope about Bob Hope. I’m a big Bob Hope fan.

I have no idea as a programmer why someone thought At 2.21 p.m. Today, they should play Bob Hope’s Alaskan Christmas Pit Stop. Two cuts after playing Andrew Schultz. I’m not sure what the crossover between Andrew Schultz fans and Bob Hope fans are, but you would have to ask Sebastian Maniscalco and the current programming team at SiriusXM. And that is your bonus episode on a Wednesday morning, again at noon Eastern, the regularly scheduled episode.

And if any of this has changed, I come in peace. I mean well. I have to take my father-in-law to the doctor this morning. I’m driving a car and I can’t record a podcast or edit a podcast or do research while driving a car. So I’ll be around this afternoon and if Sebastian has moved on this, I will deal with it then.

Thanks.

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