Earlier in the week, SiriusXM officially announced that Stephen A. Smith was joining the lineup at Mad Dog Sports Radio to host a weekday sports talk program. In addition, Smith will be starting a weekly show centered around current events, pop culture and social commentary, and he is the executive producer on both ventures. Although 98.5 The Sports Hub morning show host Fred Toucher contends that Smith’s proverbial “green-screen prison” has grown to become wider, he is grateful to see SiriusXM presumably changing course and investing in personalities who are live on the airwaves.
“I’m glad at least someone that’s on the radio is getting paid a lot of money,” Toucher siad. “It’s the first right thing that company’s done in a very long time. If I’m a stockholder, I’m like, ‘Finally, not a podcast.’ You brought a big name in to do a radio show instead of hiring some dumb podcaster. How long did it take them to learn? Two months?”
Toucher pointed to SiriusXM gaining the exclusive rights to the SmartLess podcast featuring Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes under a multiyear agreement reportedly valued at $100 million. With the ability to listen to the podcast on other platforms, he wondered exactly what the company was receiving in this deal. On top of that, he mentioned how in the early days of the enterprise, Howard Stern and Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo, along with other big radio stars and DJs, helped build the brand. When it began to struggle with the proliferation of the internet and streaming, he explained that the company decided to throw money at podcasts.
“Put people on the air live,” Toucher said. “Live, live, live! It’s your advantage over podcasts. Put it on live. Shrink the amount of channels if you have to. Make it live. And finally, I like Mad Dog a lot, but they have added Stephen A. Smith live. Now it’s a replay happening in the evening, but live to their lineup, which excites me, because at least companies seem to be going, ‘You know what? In order to compete, we need live talent – talent on as news breaks, talent on to communicate with the audience.’”
Toucher asked if satellite radio would still be around if it was not for Stern, who was a live and local radio star. From there, Rob “Hardy” Poole wondered what SiriusXM was getting out of doing business with SmartLess, and he conjectured that the satellite radio company must be selling the rights to the show towards other podcasting platforms. No matter the mode of doing business in this sense though, Toucher does not see the point engaging in such a transaction.
“Any way you slice it, it’s stupid,” Toucher said. “It’s not live, and that’s what the advantage [is that] Sirius has over podcasts.”
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