XM could have had the best comedy channel ever on radio or any medium for years (You would have to assume that the comics would have stopped doing the shows as their careers blew up) if they had paid comedians a modest amount for their content. Lets say paying Patrice, Louie, and Burr to do a weekly radio show in 2007 (when they had clearly established how good they were) would have been 200k each (paying for both the comedians time and the cost of the staff and co-hosts if any) and if you really wanted to go cheap maybe 125-150k. That's 400-600k a year for high quality weekly content from the best comedians in the game.

On top of that you in 2007 had O and A on Free FM/K-Rock to promote the channel on. Patrice, Louie, and Burr where 3 of the top guests on that show at the time, imagine them going on the K-Rock show killing for hours and then plugging a XM show. How many more subs would you get? How many more subs would hang onto the service hearing 3 extra shows a week from the top 3 comics on the show?

Even if giving Patrice, Burr, and Louie a 3-4 hour weekly show for 38 weeks would have cost 1 million dollars extra a year back in 2007, that would have been a fraction of what Siruis and XM were paying other worthless celebrities to do radio shows. Being cheap with your content is the stupidest thing when your product is content.

Yeah XM and then Sirius XM really fucked up a golden opportunity. Even if they had competition from Pod-casts as the decade wore on they still could have had 3 of the best comics doing a live radio show weekly most weeks.

With that kind of exclusive content and content that can't be easliy replicated by a podcast (Live with calls is something few if any podcasts do) you would have doubled if not tripled the subs that that channel attracted. Live radio is still content that differs from podcasts and XM selling that with the top comics who had national exposure on FM would have been a great business model.

Instead they spent untold millions on celebs with no radio experience. Sad how much of a great opportunity they had to build the talent of that channel. And I am sure other channels could have developed and paid talent better cheaper talent too. With O and A they had the comics to put the money into it and the platform to promote it.

When O and A were first on XM their audience was very small so the value of plugging their shows was very limited. Not saying that promotion wasn't valueable but their audience was very small at that point. I think Patrice and guys like Burr went on there for both promotion and because they liked to. XM really should have paid them something small even 300-400 as show plus promotion would have at least made it worth their while.

On the CBS side the promotion for shows was actually something worth giving away free funny for. Reaching all those markets and a much bigger audience was worth it. But them doing the extra 2 hour for XM was pretty worthless as far as promotion. The FM and XM audiences already heard their plugs and the XM audience even in those days was still fairly small compared to the FM audience.

XM should have given O and A a budget to pay the comics and pay for programming on the channel. 100k a year to pay comics for content. That would have been a much smarter idea then not pay them and hope they give you content.

I listened to that a while back (And yeah it was clear XM only was going to pay him to do the show cheap if at all) but that was while Patrice was doing it he did a few more shows after that. I always thought that it was simply that XM wasn't going to pay Patrice to do it weekly so he just kept doing it once a month or whenever he got the chance/felt like it.

I just always woundered if there was a specific reason for Patrice stopping it all together, the way he talked about it sounded like he may have wanted it to continue in some format.