The Last of the Famous International Playboys

It's been very cold in New York this week. This morning, after a night of freezing rain, we woke up to the first nice day of the so-called festive season. A perfect day for what took place this morning: the last terrestrial radio broadcast of The Howard Stern Show.

I must admit that although I've never been a great fan of Howard Stern, I still consider him and his posse to be one of the most culturally significant aspects of American radio in the last 20 years. Hearing the last couple of hours of his broadcast on K-Rock this morning, and then following the Yahoo! live webcast of his induction into the Sirius Satellite Radio family (by no less a controversial figure than Martha Stewart) at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square, was quite a pleasant way to spend the rest of this morning.

Without Howard Stern, commercial radio in the USA is no longer interesting. His move to Sirius, however, does not make me want to get a satellite radio set. The business sense in Stern's move to Sirius is that such a popular entertainment figure can draw in a big enough audience to make satellite radio the next big thing in broadcasting. I'm skeptical. I believe that Stern will simply become a cult classic in a couple of years unless there's cross-media exposure with either the Internet or even something as conventional as his old show on E! The likelihood of things going in this direction is quite high, as can be seen from the recently launced Howard Nation Podcast.

That Howard Stern has been driven off the terrestrial airwaves is an apparent victory for the Christian Right and others who are troubled by his brand of humor. Stern believes that the final triumph is towards free speech since his new show on Sirius will not be subject to the regulations that control terrestrial broadcasting. In any case, satellite radio is too much of a commercial venture to attract a new generation of listeners. The new generation is more interested in actively practicing free speech rather than passively receiving free speech.

At the risk of reading back this post in a couple of years with egg all over my face, I'll get off my soap box now, but I'll stick to my skepticism about satellite radio, at least in the model adopted by Sirius.