HOWARD: … This terrestrial radio thing was killing me with the censorship. I had felt alone. Many times they'd tell me they can't expand my radio stations, you're too outrageous, we can't put you on in Atlanta. I was fed up.
ROB BURNETT: When I heard you were down to only 27 radio stations, I said that's small…
HOWARD: I went to them and said, you have three radio stations in Atlanta. You're only billing 2 million dollars there. I can do better. They said, no you can't. It's too hard to sell you…
–My comment: I’m sure rock station Z93 billed more than $2 million a year when they could have picked up Stern in the 1990s into 2004, when he went to Sirius. Stern was referencing CBS’s trio of stations which included WAOK-AM and WVEE-FM, both targeting African Americans and not really Stern territory.
Still, Stern’s frustration were very fair: why not try him when nothing else was working? Would he have been that tough a sell to advertisers in Atlanta? Stern did alienate a lot of people with this content (and drove the FCC nuts), but he also had a hugely loyal audience. Would that have translated in a broad way here in Atlanta? We’ll never know. Z93 tried the much less talented Greaseman once and he bombed. (In fact, he was one of the worst jocks I’ve ever heard in my life.)
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