After years of running battles with the FCC over his broadcast content, Howard Stern moved with great fanfare to Sirius satellite radio and invited his 12 million listeners to join him.  Stern promised that he would perform even better without the shackles of decency imposed on him by the government, and Sirius paid him hundreds of millions for his show.  Three years later, the Los Angeles Times reports that Stern has largely made himself irrelevant:

Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed King of All Media, has lost his crown.

The shock jock’s syndicated morning radio show once drew a national audience of 12 million, but since jumping to satellite radio three years ago, his listeners have dwindled to a fraction of that. Where once Stern routinely commanded a parade of Hollywood’s hottest stars — George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Julia Roberts — today publicists are left to tout studio appearances by the likes of Chevy Chase, Joan Rivers or Hulk Hogan.

Stern, weary of fighting the Federal Communications Commission over hefty fines and charges of indecency on his terrestrial show, wanted creative independence on the unregulated airwaves of satellite. He got it — and a lucrative five-year contract worth hundreds of million of dollars.

But for a 54-year-old man who once likened his youthful craving for media attention to a heroin addiction, the move may have come with unintended consequences. Along with the loss of a massive daily radio audience, Stern has also watched as his past triumphs of a hit movie, bestselling books and huge pay-per-view television specials recede into memory.

I never understood the move, outside of the money.  Stern had built a network of affiliates that would have made almost any radio host green with envy, along with a bad-boy reputation that made for a certain train-wreck appeal.  Building that kind of broadcast base for a morning show based in New York City is no easy task, especially when Stern went off the air on the West Coast about the time people began waking up (in LA, they would simply repeat the show).

Satellite radio had only a fraction of Stern’s audience in total, and there was no guarantee that he would have every one of them listening. The lesson from satellite TV suggested the opposite: with hundreds of channels offering specialized programming, the audience was much more likely to fragment than to coalesce around a single shock jock.  Sirius certainly won more subscribers by signing Stern, but Stern never had a chance of getting the majority of Sirius subscribers to tune into his show.

As ironic as this sounds, Stern needed the FCC more than he realized.  They made him famous, and the occasional fines turned out to be inexpensive PR.  When he conducted his battles against the heavy hand of censorship, everyone wanted to be part of it.  Without the rebellion, Stern diminished into porn-fanboy radio.  His audience simply didn’t bother to follow, and the A-list guests left.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Stern return to terrestrial radio again when his contract expired in 2010.  He may not get hundreds of millions to do it, but if he’s managed his money well enough from the Sirius contract, he won’t need it, either.  He will want to return to relevance, and he’ll need to do that before he becomes so passé as to make it impossible.