Radio Snake Eats Own Tail
Morning radio, as you must already know, is a lucrative affront to civilization. It’s bad, bad, bad. Judging by ratings, it hasn’t gotten much worse than “Diamond” David Lee Roth’s short-lived replacement gig for the Howard Stern show. Sources say (not to me, I’m getting this from the Associated Press) that Roth’s show is just about over, just four months into its increasingly painful run.
Stern vacated the CBS Radio gig earlier this year to do a show on Sirius Satellite Radio. So where is Roth’s replacement coming from? XM Satellite Radio. Seven CBS stations are going to fill the time slot with Opie and Anthony’s show, licensed from XM. They have been on satellite since 2002, when they were fired by CBS radio for a raunchy stunt involving sex in a cathedral.
The deal will put three hours of the 5-hour O and A on CBS, thus preserving some of the XM exclusive rights. Frankly, if you are getting 3 hours of those guys a day are you really going to pay extra for 5? Maybe.
It isn’t that weird an arrangement. NPR has a few shows on Satellite and Terrestrial, and BBC broadcasts whole programming days. However this O and A thing marks the biggest commercial cross-platform… thing. Furthermore, it’s a major humiliation for CBS radio, forced to go crawling back to Opie and Anthony for their airtime needs.
It all violates a fundamental law of nature, the moving of talent from Satellite to Terrestrial. It is like water going down the drain clockwise below the equator. However, the water thing is an urban myth, and Opie and Anthony do well in urban markets, so it all makes sense.