You know how excited we all were back in July that legendary Coast to Coast host Art Bell would be coming back to broadcast radio with a new show on the Sirius XM Network? Yeah, about that… never mind. Only six weeks after Art Bell’s Dark Matter began on September 16th, the show’s been officially cancelled.
Bell’s main beef? That Sirius XM was having trouble streaming their shows online, which made it difficult for listeners to tune in.
“Many thousands of my listeners came on board when we began, you know,” he said in an audio clip on his website, Artbell.com, “but they’ve fallen off because of that reason, a very difficult reason — 1001 error and many others. It’s kind of a systemic problem. We do have a monstrous vehicle audience, of course. However, for a caller-driven show like this one, speaking only to people on cell phones in moving vehicles is somewhat difficult.”
In addition, Bell also expressed his concern that the show was being pirated all across the world, and lobbied Sirius to “alter their normal method of doing business and allow free streaming for everybody” of the live show from his website. Hey, that’s kind of awesome. Of course, Sirius wasn’t particularly interested, and it was announced yesterday that because the two parties could not come to an agreement, Dark Matter would end.
Sirius Buzz, a site devoted to news about the XM channel and its competitors, had this to say on the matter:
The departure of Bell, as unfortunate as it is, should be a signal to SiriusXM. The company has a compelling product, great content, and great potential, but in some ways has lost the edge that it once had. The frustrations of Bell can be heard on other channels as well. Opie & Anthony, Howard Stern, Jay Thomas, and others have all at times expressed a great deal of frustration.
Art Bell’s website also put out a statement, saying that “We’ll examine our options and may be able to return in a different format and medium.” Might we suggest teaming up with a podcast network, Art? A caller-driven show about space and paranormal might do pretty well somewhere like Twit.TV, which specializes in free streaming video broadcasts that are later uploaded to iTunes in both video and audio format. There’s no need to duck out of the broadcast game completely is our point here. We miss you already, Art.
(via HuffPo Weird, image via Sirius XM)
- Man, and we’d been really pumped about the new show
- At least NASA’s station is still going strong
- We’re sure the aliens in space miss Art Bell’s broadcasts, too
