Goodbye Mr. Zellner
Today I spend the day walking around the Magic Kingdom, and got a text message, which was pure magic for me, the news was that John Zellner was leaving Sirius XM to take a job at Clear Channel Communications.
If you have been reading the Satellite Dish for any length of time you will know I have been critical as of late about satellite radio.
I have been a subscriber to both Sirius and XM since both became publicly available and loved them both up until about a year ago. That is when the quality of the programming really took a turn for the worse.
The main programming person at XM was Lee Abrams who left for greener pastures, replacing him was John Zellner. When the news was announced that John Zellner was replacing Lee Abrams the XM fan forums lit up with subscribers saying “oh no.”
It seems as though John Zellner was known for shrinking playlists in the radio world, and satellite radio fans were worried that he was going to do the same to them, and unfortunately he did.
Decades channels known for having over 3,000 songs in their playlists saw their playlists cut down to a few hundred songs.
XM Radio went from being a joy to listen to into nothing more then a subscription FM music service sans the commercials. The Zellner effect that everyone had feared had taken over at XM.
Then the merger happened and things got worse, Zellner now oversaw the music operations at Sirius XM and in November of last year more changes went into effect at the hands of Zellner that made more satellite radio fans unhappy. Many of the music stations were dropped and replaced across both satellite radio services. Under Zellner’s control a majority of the music channels was now duplicated on both Sirius and XM.
The move (which was made to help eliminate cut operations costs) was not well received by satellite radio customers. After a few weeks of customer complaints Sirius XM had to return a few cut channels back to their lineup.
No matter how you try to explain things and rationalize the changes and why they were done the fingers all went pointing back to Zellner.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t thing Mr. Zellner is a bad guy, in fact I communicated with him a few times and he normally replied to emails in a matter of minutes. The issues I had with him was he was trying to turn satellite radio into what worked for him in the FM world, what he did not seem to understand was that many people subscribed to Satellite Radio to get away from the small playlists of FM radio.
Now with Zellner leaving to go to Clear Channel there is some hope deep inside me that whoever replaces John Zellner will work to bring back the magic of satellite radio and will work to restore the thousands of missing songs to the channels where they belong.
I wish Mr. Zellner the best at his new position at Clear Channel, I am sure he will do a great job there, as programming for FM radio is what Mr. Zellner seems to do best.
If U Only Knew commented:
Zellner was a pox on XM the moment he arrived. He was universally despised throughout the programming and operations departments (and probably beyond). Employees, past and present, are wondering what took so long while raising a toast to the wicked witch leaving the company to pastures far more appropriate. And I do use the imagery of pastures intentionally.
Lee Abrams commented:
Comical. What you fail to realize is that Mel is firmly in control and will call the Programming shots - it never was Zelner (as you seem to have forgotten it was ALWAYS Eric Logan over Lee Abrams and Mr. Zellner). BTW, you do know that Mr. Zellner's replacement was promoted from within to save money already?
Anyway, you also fail to realize that though you like long playlists, that is the problem Satellite Radio found itself in trying to get to the masses (and the only way to survive as the debt was too high to be niche).
If you had short playlists, the masses wondered why they never heard the big emotional hits and as thus, found no reason to renew their subscription.
The very few who spent most of their time with Satellite Radio did not care to hear the hits in that rotation, however, they were far too few for XM/Sirius to be successful.
Catch 22.
You cannot serve two masters.
Its the reason that some just took the early Venture Capital money and ran!
Ed commented:
Unlikely. Satellite radio continues to hemorrhage money despite millions of paying subscribers so there likely won't be any expenditure to restore some of what made it great. Sadly, satellite radio will continue to nickel and dime itself to death.
