Howard Stern and Sirius/XM: another toxic investment

 Stern on Letterman in drag, now a drag for investors

This New York Times story is surprisingly kind to Mel Karmazin and his Sirius/XM satellite radio, although when you read it, you can see the underpinnings of colossal failure.

It's the same problem newspapers and old media have: people don't want to pay for something they can get for free. And in the case of Stern, his enormous salary and the fact that it makes him so unwilling to do the kind of marketing it takes to keep himself in the public eye, will doom the service.

I'm still an AM/FM  radio guy, which, I know, is so 50 years ago. If I could get satellite for free, it would be in my arsenal. It was for two years. But in this economy, I couldn't justify spending $200 a year to track Stern, when I can get the gist of what he says on blogs, such as www.marksfriggin.com.

And I don't see what else I can get from satellite that I can't get from the Internet or my own iPod, or iPhone.

Also, and this is funny, some pirate near my neighborhood broadcasts Stern on FM, so when I'm on a certain road on the way to work, I can pick it up all day long, if I remember to tune in.

Like Dan Rather, Bryant Gumbel, Axl Rose, or Johnny Carson after he retired, once you are out of the public eye, who cares what you say? That's pretty much how the public feels about Stern, whose popularity grew geometrically as he made news with his books, movie and public appearances.

But with his move from 18 million listeners on free radio to 2 million on satellite, he's become an asterisk, not the big event---even if his show is as funny and insightful than ever.

Am I wrong here? Are you satellite evangelists that happy with the service?

P.S. What is with the New York Times copy editing? In today's story about bad loans at Washington Mutual, they talk about the company's meteoric rise (meteors fall, as Mercury News copy editors, when they had literate ones, used to point out). No copy editors here though. All the illiteracy is my own.