Stern Show 2.0
So there have been a few changes since Howard agreed to re-sign with Sirius only one of them has been positive which was the inclusion of the Stern Channels on the official Sirius-XM Iphone app. The rest of the news has been all bad as far as I’m concerned.
First Howard has been cutting his live programming back 20% a day. Including the wrap up show, we used to get live content until noon. Now it is all over at 11. I enjoy the wrap up show, Gary and John actually allow people to finish a thought, something Howard is not very good at doing. I would have been fine with just filling in the extra time with an extended wrap up show but nope we don’t even get that.
Add on top of that Howard’s stated intent to work even less during this new 5 year contract. It sounded like eventually he will only be on three days a week in addition to his already staggering amount of vacation. This wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t fill those dead days stupidly with clips from the live shows of the week. I mean wtf, I just heard the show on Monday, do I need to hear it again on Friday? Talk about exerting the bare minimum of effort.
F let Riley Martin, Sal & Richard, or any of the other whacked out personalities involved with the show fill in some of that dead time. Howard bitches sometimes about the staff providing good content outside the boundaries of his live show. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. If you are going to cut back your hours to a bare minimum at least give Sirius customers SOMETHING live to listen to.
In addition to Howard giving us less for our money, Sirius did not reach an agreement with Bubba to continue on in his role in the afternoons. Now I don’t enjoy Bubba as much as Howard but I enjoyed listening to him more often than not. Sirius came in and offered Bubba an 80% pay cut which is f’ing ridiculous.
Ironically Bubba was originally used to fill in the dead spots when Stern was not on the air which worked out great. Now Sirius seems to care less if we have original programming or not.
Hell I wish they would have given whatever they pay Jay Thomas to sit in on Friday mornings on 101 to Bubba. Jay’s show is AWFUL in my opinion. I have never been able to listen to more than 10-15 minutes of it without turning it off.
This just continues a long tradition of Sirius offering it’s customers less and less while charging them more and more. I really hate giving them any of my money. I am hoping to at least cut loose one of my subscriptions and just use my phone to receive content in the truck.