Officially announced as a 30 Day Hiatus in response to the Queen and Condi Homeless rape bit last week, fans of the show are reporting through well-known sites like whackbag that O&A have actually been terminated. In my opinion, this is horrible news. Our society is growing more into a humorless blameocracy every day.
How the hell do you get fired from XM? Wasn't that kind of the point of them going to XM, so they could say whatever the hell they want?
Except that there is no competition. IIRC Opie and Anthony pulled out of Dallas/Fort Worth recently because of a 0.0 rating.
This is a slight mischaracterization. The difference is that O&A would tell listeners, while Howard losing markets was always underplayed, while market gains were hyped. I like both of the shows, but Howie's last 2 years were a shadow of himself, and now he won't even take a stand for fellow jocks Imus or O&A. Seems like he turned out more like his dad than he'd like to admit.
You, on the other hand, think violent rape is hiLARious. In all seriousness, over the last 2-3 months, I've started to wonder if you're taking on a new bigsoccer persona, or whether you've suffered some kind of pyschological trauma. You're turning into that guy who wanted us all to watch the video of Nick Berg getting beheaded.
It's all about the potential merger between XM and Sirius. The FCC, while not currently regulating satellite content, does have direct control over any mergers in that bandwidth. It's a tough sell to begin with, so XM doesn't want to give the FCC any excuses to disapprove the transaction.
Come on, you know that isn't true. He was saying that tasteless jokes about a particular scenario were funny because they were tasteless.
Capitalism wins again! Really, people, get a grip. Just because sat radio lives outside of FCC scrutiny doesn't mean that a publicly-traded company like XM is willing to risk loss of sponsorship money (remember, both O&A and Stern still have commericals) or subscription money by employing DJs who say incredibly stupid things that bring bad publicity to the company. If O&A were so wildly popular and profitable that XM could withstand the bad publicity, they'd still have a job. They aren't, so they don't. Same as Imus.
Because of this move, XM will be losing subscription money. This will turn out to be an awful business move.
Sub money < Ad money However this move is potentially disastrous PR wise with listeners regardless of what flavor of XM they like.
Or more likely, they weighed lost subscriptions against lost advertising and figured there was no contest.
No, but there's advertising on the other channels which could be affected. On a side note, the stock market seems to have given a collective yawn to the news.
Best O&A call ever: "Hey Anthony. Stop ranking on Howard, you're just like him. An ugly shock jock from Long Island who's getting a divorce." Dead silence followed by nervous "yeah, you got me" laughter. What's with the phony voices they use? Horrible.
Jesus! So when an advertiser goes to tout his wares on XM, he only looks narrowly at the channel he's on, not to see if by advertizing his brand is associated with anything controversial which might do damage? That's an incredible business strategy. I'm sure HBS or Wharton would love to hear more.......
"Look, I only advertised on P.76 in the middle of an article about Californian Wineries. Whaddya mean buyers are upset that I advertised in Anal Monthly? How does that cause me to lose market share?"
Well, advertisers don't pull from Nickelodeon if MTV does something questionable. Why would this be any different?
As a company, XM gets to make this decision and take that chance. Their beancounters know a lot more about the relative profitability of O&A than you or I do. All evidence points to O&A losing money for XM. Their $2-per-month show did terribly, apparently (no sub numbers were ever announced), and if they were a marketable commodity on their own, XM would never have allowed them to return to terrestrial radio. Their contract likely had a morals clause, and XM was just looking for an excuse to use it.