I like watching football (and other sports to lesser extents), but listening to somebody talk about what pro football players got cut/traded/whatever bores me to tears. We all have different interests. I happen to like the ‘morning zoo crew’ type shows, particularly The Monsters and Shannon Burke (and Drew Garabo, who is no longer on the air anyway). Since about half of the music stations on FM have a “Morning Zoo Crew” type shows in the morning, there’s obviously a market for this.
However, they only have 1 channel for shows like this, and several for sports (everything from ESPN radio to live coverage of college football, [which is nice to have in a pinch]). It doesn’t make any sense to scrap/dilute the one station that fills a niche that there is obviously a market for.
I don’t have a problem with Tony K., he might be great at what he does. But what he does ain’t comedy, and doesn’t belong on this channel. If you were a history buff who liked to watch The History Channel when you got home from work, you would probably be upset to find out that THC decided to play Days Of Our Lives and Guiding Light every evening from 7 - 9. Let’s just say, (very hypothetically) that there was only 1 XM channel for sports talk shows, and that it had Tony K., Jim Rome, et al. You’re happily listening along, but one day, it turns out that one of these shows has been replaced by Shannon Burke, a non-sports talk show out of Florida. Would you be upset?
I think that what they should do, if they really think that Tony K. and G.G.L. are “extreme”, is to add another “extreme” talk channel, say 153, and put them on it, as well as, oh, say, Bob and Tom, maybe Jim Rome (if he’s not on another sports station, I don’t really listen to those), or whoever. Leave 152 for stuff like the before mentioned and Phil Hendrie (i.e. comedy).
From a business standpoint, it doesn’t make sense for them to remove a show that a lot of people like to listen to, some of them almost exclusively. Adding shows is fine. Removing them, expecially when there aren’t suitable replacements (i.e. another similar channel/show that appeals to a particular person’s personal tastes), is bad for business. They must offer a lot more than the average person can get for free from FM. For free, I can listen to Bob and Tom on the morning drive, music on several channels, Dr. Joy Browne, and, if I were so inclined, Jim Rome, as well as GGL, Rush Limbaugh, et al. (Replacing the last half of Shannon Burke with GGL was the more mind boggling thing; all he does is tell lies in a monotone voice. It’s just that adding Tony K. completely took Shannon Burke off the XM air.)
Also, I’d say that the majority of XM subscribers are truckers, or other people who can listen to the radio all day. (One of the attractions of XM for truckers is that you can travel across the country and never lose the signal for your favorite shows/stations.) I personally don’t want to listen to music all day long; it gets old quickly. I’m assumming that most people are like me in that aspect. I know that a lot of truckers are fans of the shows that I like (I have no statistics, and I wonder if the people at XM do). It seems to me that adding a channel for “extreme” talk shows would be a better idea than replacing “Morning zoo crew type shows” with a sports talk show and a political talk show.
Now that I think about it, maybe they’ll add Shannon Burke and other "Morning Zoo Crew-type shows) to channel 202 (the O&A channel). Anybody here listen to channe 202? Is it just the show live, and then repeats of it on a constant rotation?
To legitimize my post, to get to the OP: I just got my letter today. It says that they will increase rates on April 2. For current subscribers, the increase starts at the end of their current billing cycle. For example, for me, the start date is April 9. So I get an extra week for being a 2-year subscriber. I guess I get a week to try out Opie and Anthony. They better rule, because I’m not paying $13 a month just to listen to the Monsters during my drive to work (I finally got a real job!)