The results are in. According to trade magazine Radio & Records, most of Howard Stern‘s former FM listeners appear to have switched to Sirius satellite radio or just turned off his replacements.
Based on preliminary numbers released by Arbitron for winter 2006, stations featuring Stern’s successors, David Lee Roth and Adam Carolla, have suffered serious drops in listenership.
The nation’s biggest radio market, New York’s WFNY (formerly known as WXRK), dropped from #1 to #18 since Stern’s departure to Sirius satellite radio. To put it in another perspective, Roth attracted an only 63,000 listeners per quarter hour in January 2006, versus Stern’s 277,000 in December 2005.
The news wasn’t much better for Los Angeles’ KLSX (97.1 Free FM), where Carolla’s show attracted a dismal 0.7 share in January, making KLSX the lowest-rated commercial FM station in Los Angeles.
The Arbitron ratings from Radio & Records are unofficial monthly “extrapolations,” with the official numbers expected next month. Stern began his new show on Sirius satellite radio in January, and due to the subscriber-based nature of the satellite business, pure ratings are not available. The company did report, however, that its subscriber base ballooned from around 600,000 on the day the Stern deal was announced in October 2004 to more than 3 million as of January 5, with more than 1.1 million signing on in the fourth quarter of 2005 alone.
[Source: MTV News]
