Taking on the Fleet Street rumor mill isn’t easy, but it appears SiriusXM and Howard Stern are giving it a shot.
In the lead-up to Stern’s next contract talks with the satellite radio giant — his five-year deal was estimated to be worth $100 million a year and is up at the end of 2025 — a familiar refrain of “Is this it for Howard?” has echoed a bit louder given his age, 71, and this transitional media moment (podcasts are flooding the zone, and also becoming the new TV, too).
This time it was The Sun, with its Aug. 5 air quote “to be canceled” headline, that sent a reminder that it’s once again negotiations mode between the “King of All Media” and his home for the past two decades. The News Corp. paper, citing an insider that contradicted its own headline, said that Sirius would be offering Stern a new deal but the two parties are “never going to meet on the money.”
The line reads like a “work the refs” blind quote — it puts both Stern and SiriusXM on notice that this could be a breaking point — while also being fed into the media ecosystem with plenty of time on the clock to reach a new deal before the host’s contract is up. Now, unlike prior negotiation dramas, the wild card is which side may want to walk this time, at least that may be the tabloid’s premise. It pages the lawyers and dealmakers for both sides to get serious, or not.
While it seems unlikely that SiriusXM is looking to shed itself of its most recognizable asset in a tough moment for the radio giant — its consumer-facing app underperformed and its been stuck at around 33 million subscribers for a few years while navigating the rise of a podcast-driven era that has threatened its walled garden — it doesn’t seem out of realm of possibility that the company is looking for Stern to take a home team discount. (Speaking of dealmakers, it’s also worth noting that the super agent that had repped Stern in his last go-around for a SiriusXM contract, and for many decades, Don Buchwald, passed away last year.)
In any case, on Wednesday, a promo began running on SiriusXM leaning in to the drama. “The tabloids have spoken: Howard Stern fired, canceled, is it really ‘Bye-Bye Booey’? Chaos is swirling at The Howard Stern Show,” intoned a movie trailer-ready narrator in the ad running on SiriusXM. “Did staffers talk to the press? Are writers withholding their best jokes? Nobody knows what’s going on or who to trust.”
Naturally, the promo is a set up for Stern himself. “Now we can reveal all the questions will be answered, all the truths will be told by the one man truly on the inside,” the trailer narrator said on SiriusXM’s airwaves. “Howard Stern will speak Tuesday September 2.” Well played.
Publicly, SiriusXM executives, who are asked about Stern nearly every chance there’s a media press availability, keep pointing to him as a unique talent while also ushering in new stars like Alex Cooper, Stephen A. Smith, Trevor Noah and the Smartless crew as well as recent adds like the Morbid true crime podcast.
And SiriusXM is now managing its stars on multiple platforms. “When a creator’s reach suddenly expands, such as Mel Robbins show, which is up more than 500 percent year-over-year, or Conan O’Brien adding full-length podcast video on YouTube, we are able to quickly and effectively monetize that growth,” SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Witz said on a July 31 earnings call.
The company is also in the midst of belt-tightening, dealing with reduced advertising revenue — down 2 percent year-over-year — and also cutting its tech and product workforce by 10 percent in order to “operate more nimbly,” CFO Thomas Barry stated.
But that doesn’t mean keeping Howard Stern is a deal-breaker. “He’s been with me and the company going on two decades, and so he’s pretty happy, but he’s also able, like many great artists, to stop whenever he wants,” chief content officer Scott Greenstein told The Hollywood Reporter last year of Stern. “Nobody will ever replace them. We would never try to replace them. It’s not what is even appropriate, but even practical. What you always want to do in anything, whether it’s a sports team or a media company, you want to have a great bench of talent that have their own identity.”
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