The Howard Stern Show
The Howard Stern Show is a radio talk show, which is currently broadcasted on the Sirius XM satellite radio. Previously, the show was available on terrestrial radio, since 1979. That was the year when Howard Stern received his first job as a disc jockey at a morning show, in Hartford, at the WCCC station. One year later, Stern was in Detroit, at the WWWW station, and in 1981 he was in Washington, at WWDC.
Dreaming to do a show in New York, Howard Stern signed up with WNBC, and started doing shows in the afternoons. He continued to work there for the next three years, even though he didn’t see eye to eye on many issues with the management. Eventually, Stern was fired from the job and he went to WXRK next, in November 1985. In ’86, he begun working in the mornings and he also got the first fines for the content of his shows, from the FCC. In 1991, his show was being syndicated in LA, Washington DC and Philadelphia.
The total duration of the show was over twenty years at WXRK, and it ended its terrestrial form in 2005, on December 16. The Howard Stern Show was heard all over the country, in 60 different markets, getting a total audience of around 20 million.
The slot occupied by the Howard Stern Show was between 2 and 6 PM initially, but moved between 6 and 10 AM in 1986 and he occupied this slot until 2005, when he went to Sirius and left WXRK. 1986 was also the year when Stern went national for the first time, as his show also appeared on WYSP, in Philadelphia, where he took the station’s rank from eleventh to third, in just a couple of months. In 1987, Stern was being syndicated in yet another market, Washington DC, at station WJFK-FM. In the next two years, Howard Stern managed to grow his audience from 2.2% to 5.9%.
In 1991, he added Los Angeles and the station KLSX to his simulcast, provoking a wave of controversy in the area, but eventually taking the lead in the city’s ratings within the next year. By that time, he also had a 9.5% audience share in New York, and a 6.4% share in LA.
He made the national news in 1994, when he managed to convince a man not to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge. The man called the show and he was kept on the line for five minutes, until the cops had a chance to get to the scene and take him into custody.
In 1997, the Howard Stern Show went international, entering the airwaves of Canada on CILQ in Toronto and CHOM in Montreal.
In 2004, on October 4th, Howard Stern signed a contract for five years, with Sirius Satellite Radio, which is a radio service that is subscription based and not under the regulations for broadcasting which are imposed by the FCC. The total sum of the contract was around $100 million per year with all the costs included, and that includes the $83 million stock payment done when Stern surpassed the subscriber goals, in January 2007. In 2004, Howard Stern was considered the second celebrity from the point of view of the fortune, with over $300 million, thanks to the Sirius Satellite Radio deal.