Fans of “The Howard Stern Show” on SiriusXM are staging a mutiny, with longtime listeners canceling subscriptions en masse after plans surfaced to slash the program to just one new live episode per week, reports The Sun.
The reduced schedule is set to take effect after Stern’s annual summer hiatus, following Labor Day, with the rest of the airtime filled by archived material from the show’s decades-long catalog. The change was disclosed to staff during a Zoom call in mid-July, when roughly a dozen employees—including some on-air personalities—were laid off and sent home immediately with tenure-based severance packages.
Stern is retaining a core group of veteran producers, sources said, because “he just doesn’t need that much content anymore.”
At the time, the arrangement appeared to trim his previous roughly 100 shows a year (typically three days a week for much of the year) by about a third. The further reduction to a single weekly three-hour broadcast marks a sharper downsizing for the 72-year-old host, who pioneered the shock-jock format and joined Sirius in 2006 after building his career on terrestrial radio since the late 1970s.
Outraged fans have flooded social media and forums with vows to cancel: “@SIRIUSXM if all this Stern stuff is true, I’m cancelling after 20 years. I’m a huge fan. But paying for 1 3hr show a week is insane,” one wrote on X. On Reddit, veterans of the show declared: “Dedicated Stern listener since 1983; canceled my $5 a month plan yesterday,” while others echoed, “I ended my subscription I had since day one a few days ago” and “I was a dedicated listener since 1968 and I canceled today.” Many argued the remaining talent could still generate more original content and that the reduced offering no longer justifies the subscription cost.
The program has steadily scaled back over the years—from five live days a week in its terrestrial era to four, then three (Monday through Wednesday)—with heavy use of repeats during breaks. The latest overhaul leaves remaining staff “walking on eggshells,” according to reports, and comes amid broader questions about the future of the long-running franchise under the new deal that runs through 2028. SiriusXM has not publicly commented on the staff cuts or schedule change.