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Caloroga Shark Media. Hi, I’m Johnny Mack. My phone is blowing up with people asking me about this Howard Stern story. So I thought, let me just record a commentary episode. I’m not working off the script.
I’m just talking off the top of my head. In case you missed it, the US Sun was the original source of this The US Sun last week. Let me pull up the proper headline, just to get it right. The Howard Stern Show to be canceled after nearly twenty years, right, So, canceled is a loaded word in twenty twenty five the US Sun, And I’ll let you for yourself decide where that is in terms of reporting, somewhere between the New York Times and Daily Comedy News. Whatever you think of the US Sun, this is from the US Sun.
An insider said, Stern’s contract goes up to the fall, and while Sirius is planning to make him an offer, they don’t intend for him to take it serious. And Stern are never going to meet on the money he’s going to want. It’s no longer worth the investment after you saw what happened with Stephen Colbert. It’s just like they can’t afford to keep them going. Okay, okay, okay, okay.
So once we say the word cancel, now we’re also talking about Stephen Colbert. Forget about the Stephen Colbert of it all. But that totally to the side. This has nothing to do with this. The source claims.
If Sirius isn’t going to give Stern a good offer, I don’t think I would have anything to do with his ratings. It’s more likely everything to do with the political climate. Now we’ll see some more nonsense articles talking about how many people are listening to Howard, and I will get into that as well. Listen to me. Here’s the premise of everything I’m going to say.
And I say this as somebody who was already listening to WNBC as a was I even a teenager. Yet when Howard first came to the WNBC, I was already a listener to the station.
And then this guy named Howard Stern started doing afternoons.
I followed him to k Rock. I was at Serious Satellite Radio when the deal was announced. I was in Los Angeles the morning it was announced. I was there when Howard came on board, and we had fewer than one million subscribers. If I remember the numbers correctly, and I will tell you this.
There is zero chance I’m not leaving the door open a crack, zero chance, zero chance that Howard Stern is gonna come back from summer vacation and be like, Yep, that’s it, Robin. We’re doing nine ten more weeks and that’s it for my career. No way. Okay. I’ve heard people refer to the Derek Jeter farewell tour.
That’s what you’re gonna get. Remember when Johnny Carson. Maybe you don’t because I’m ancient, those of us who remember when Johnny Carson stepped down, you’re going to get that. I always predicted Howard would do a two year farewell tour, and I’m still not sure that he won’t. I guarantee you he does at least a one year farewell tour.
Now write this down because people are just being stupid. Write this down. Okay. Howard has not really been in the news for like fifteen years, and now everybody’s talking about him every day. He loves that.
He absolutely loves that. Here’s what’s gonna happen. He’s gonna come back in September off the summer break, and he’s going to lightly talk about the rumors. He’s gonna dangle. He’s gonna say phrases like I don’t know what’s going to happen, Robin.
He’s going to joke about how they’re getting to the end. He is going to milk this for the entire fall, and on the very last day into Christmas break. So I’m not sure how late into the month Howard works these days, But maybe Thursday December eleventh, maybe Thursday December eighteenth, if I have to pick, I’m going to pick Thursday December eleventh, Howard and serious announce, Oh yeah, we’ve extended a deal. Now will he get one hundred million dollars reportedly this time? I don’t know.
I have seen in the entertainment industry people renew for less and do less work. Now, I don’t know how much less work Howard could possibly do with the summers off in the three day weeks. But both sides are going to want the farewell tour. They were going to want every celebrity coming in, Lady Ganga, Paul McCartney, all the greats coming in and telling Howard how wonderful he is as he tries to cement this legacy that he’s not the shock jock, he’s not the person that did the ted dance and sketch. He’s not lesbian dial of Date guy, he’s not Beast Reality dial a day guy.
He’s the respectful great interviewer that he’s been trying to spend these last few years. There will be a farewell tour. The idea that Howard Stern is just quietly going to go into the night, no way, and conflating this with Colbert that’s just nonsense. So more nonsense going around is this nonsense that Howard Stern has an enemy at Serious XM. Again, the source on all this the US Son.
I’ll let you determine how much you enjoy the writing of the US Sun. So this version of the story, which got amplified by page six. Who are sourcing the Sun? Is that Serious XM executives have to take pains to keep Alex Cooper and Howard Stern from running into each other. Now, please understand the geography of the Serious headquarters in New York City, where I worked for ten years.
Now. I haven’t been into building a ten years, so maybe perhaps possibly there’s been a major change. But I do know some former co workers and no one has mentioned this to me. When I was there, Howard was off in his own compound. You couldn’t get into howard Land unless your key card would let you into howard Land.
Mine did not. And you never ever, ever, ever saw Howard Stern, except if you happen to be in the lobby when he was leaving for the day, walking from Howard Land to the freight elevator, which he would take down because you don’t want to write a civilian elevator. You might run into some civilians. You didn’t see him in the hallway, you didn’t se him in meetings, he didn’t see him in the bathroom. He’s off in howard Land.
So this idea that I don’t know he’s going to run into the hallway and see Alex Cooper. Even if Alex Cooper happened to be standing in front of the freight elevator, it would be a six second encounter. An insider told the son, she’s the one that bugs him. She gets hundreds of millions of hits. She has this mega one hundred and twenty five million dollar deal, and he hates that this young bubbly woman is the new thing.
They have to keep Howard away from her. They have to keep Howard away from when she comes to New York, so he’s there three days a week. I don’t know how often she’s there. This is a non story. The source claimed.
It’s completely turned Howard’s world upside down. He’s been in radio forty years and this change has really shocked everyone. Alex and Joe Rogan. These massive podcasters have traditional radio guys stunned. This is all silly.
I am also a college professor, and I have walked people through the math of the Howard Stern deal for over a decade. Now. Serious these days has a trillion different plans and I try to look into it and I don’t understand it. But the math, the way I used to teach it when I worked there, Serious was thirteen dollars a month. Okay, Now, how many people do you think came over for Howard?
When Howard came over, we had around a million subs. They’ve eventually got up to thirty million subs. Do you think one million people came over for Howard Stern in two thousand and six? Is that an absurd number? Let’s use that number.
So if a million people came over and paid thirteen dollars a month for twelve months a year. That’s one hundred and fifty six million dollars. You give a hundred million to Howard, you make a fifty six million dollar profit. If the number’s not one million, if it’s two million, now you’re making some serious change. I saw a report the other day that said Howard’s audiences down to only one hundred and twenty five thousand listeners.
I don’t know where someone would get that number from. When I worked there, you had no way to know who was listening to what on the satellite radios. You could look at Internet data and extrapolate it from streaming. Maybe the newer radios have some two way capabilities that I’m not aware of. Maybe somebody did a survey with Nielsen Audio.
I don’t know, but fine, I’ll accept your number. If we multiply one twenty five by twelve, by thirteen, we would reach nineteen million, five hundred thousand. So if the value of Howard Stern at that calculation is a nineteen and a half million, then you wouldn’t be able to pay him one hundred million dollars, but you could pay him twenty million dollars. Get the Howard halo effect. Do the farewell tour and what you’ll get from him is twenty million dollars worth of work.
So whatever he’s doing now, you’d get a fifth of that. And in the end, we used to joke when I work there, you don’t actually have to do the show. You just need press release to go out. So, as I wrote in my sub stack link in the show notes, Howard could work. I don’t know, fifteen days next year, as long as it’s the right fifteen days and it’s the maybe the January Birthday party, the big farewell event.
Could Howard sell out the Garden once? I think he could. If weird al can, I think Howard Stern can. Maybe you do a big event there. You do a couple of farewell things.
Paul McCartney comes in, Lady Gaga comes in, Tom Hanks comes by. You do fifteen of those. Here’s twenty million, Howard. That might be enough. No, I’m not saying he’s gonna do fifteen shows, but maybe he’s gonna make a little less work a little less.
But the idea that Howard Stern is just going to come back and be like Robin, We’ve got nine weeks left. It’s been a great forty years. Zero chance. And that is some bonus commentary for today. I’m going to do another bonus commentary tomorrow about Mark Marin.
I do not intend on doing this every single day, but I just had two topics on my mind that I wanted to share with you back in the morning with a normal episode