• Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I don’t even know what demographic subscribes to satellite radio these days, let along how many listen to Stern.

    Regarding how many people still listen to Stern, I obviously don’t know the exact numbers, but given that SiriusXM keeps renewing his contract which hovers around 9 figures annually, I’m going to guess that he still has an extremely large following and is probably one of the only reasons the vast majority of SiriusXM subscribers are even subscribed in the first place.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Oh yeah, he’s always been the main draw there.

      I’m not sure what his contract is like tho, they may have given him a ridiculous long contract to make the jump back in the day. So still paying him 2000s money even without that audience.

      Here’s to hoping this is just the start and Biden starts doing more appearances though.

      He needs to engage with voters if he wants to win. This is a step in the right direction at least.

      • Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I’m not sure what his contract is like tho, they may have given him a ridiculous long contract to make the jump back in the day. So still paying him 2000s money even without that audience.

        He just renewed it in I think 2020. And he’s still hovering around 100 million annually.

        And apparently both of us are vastly underestimating SiriusXM’s popularity; a quick google search shows that they pull in about $9 billion a year with a subscriber base of 34 million people. Apparently the pool of people who are too cool for AM/FM but can’t quite get the hang of Spotify is bigger than we may think.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          6 months ago

          I imagine a big draw is Stern and probably sports radio.

          Sirius XM has a long list of sports-talk and play-by-play stations. And the “listen to sports” and “browses Lemmy” venn diagram is, in fact, two entirely isolated circles.

          I don’t care much for sports but in my market I think all the sports stations are old AM radio. Satellite adds a ton of fidelity and may not have the regional blackouts TV has (that I don’t know about).

        • Pronell@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          $265 each per year. That’s wild.

          My wife got a used car with a Sirius in it. She used it for the free trial but we don’t do talk radio so it seemed completely pointless.

          • Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            I used Sirius for a short time right around when Sirius and XM were merging. Never listened to a single talk station. Couldn’t have cared less. I cared about the uncensored, commercial free music with stations tailored to different genres. It was great, and IMO worth the money at the time.

            Then came streaming. Once streaming came along, Sirius instantly became obsolete. Streaming offered me everything that Sirius had and then some. Since I didn’t need or care about talk radio, there was literally no need to keep my subscription going. I had thought that most others did the same thing. Apparently, I was wrong.