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By Mark D, December 14, 2011 12:35 am

A few months ago I took to beating Bubba over the way he’s treated his fans, mostly riled up by his requesting the removal of his forum at SternFanNetwork because it was too negative. Well it seems that Howard Stern finally got his way and got Mutt to shut down the forum. Here’s what he had to say:

I don’t go on that SternFanNetwork,” said Stern. “I hate it, and Mutt, you know, that’s his whole life…People just get on there and talk about what a horrible person I am…They’re terrible to my wife…my parents, everything. It’s awful. You know what Mutt? If you have any love for me, close that f***ing thing down.

Of course it doesn’t take a genius to point out that if Howard doesn’t go on SFN, how does he know what they are saying? Why does he even care what they are saying?

It’s obvious he visited the forums and read them. Although in the past he had played off the hate coming from SFN, I think it had easily reached it’s boiling point now. There was seemingly no one defending Howard for a multitude of reasons. From his Imus like behavior when it came to his wife, to his attempts at suing Sirius in order to get out of his most recent contract, this is no longer the Howard Stern many of us have been listening to for more then2 or 3 decades.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve been a pretty fervent listener of Howard since the early 90s. I was borderline about switching over to Satellite Radio when Howard did, but after listening to a few shows I was hooked. Before we even consider my subscription rates, I spent over 400 dollars on two different radios and all the different gear I needed. The worst part was that everything eventually broke down, even my 200 dollar Sirius Stiletto 2. But I was still able to listen to Howard, so it was fine.

But the problem became Howard himself. Personally, if there’s any moment the show jumped the shark, it was when Artie left. He was the last guy bringing any kind of energy into the studio. Even if he was telling the same story for the 100th time, at least he was excited to be telling it. I’m sure part of the refusal to replace Artie with anyone is because the person would be paid out of Howard’s pocket (That 500 million you heard he makes is actually the budget for the show). Howard now cares more about money then putting on a show.

That really should be easy to see though. He starts the news at 9 on the dot so he can be out the door at 10 on the dot. The whole time he no longer discusses or really interacts with Robin, it’s just “Anything Else, Robin?”. The program breaks feel like they take almost as long as the commercials used to at his old building, as they pad them out with the same old phony phone calls you’ve heard a million times by now.

While there are people on SFN who take the hate a bit too far, the problem for Howard (since we know he reads the board) are those somewhat sane people that have given up on him. Because he knows it’s true that he’s only a former shell of himself. Combine the fact that he now rotates 3 day weeks with 4 day weeks while taking off almost 2 whole months in the summer now and that for most Sirius susbscribers have seen a raise in their subscription rates ever since Sirius bought XM. So your getting less and less show for more and more money.

And don’t try to argue that most subscribers do more then just listen to Howard. I’m willing to bet a good majority of the people who subscribe listen to Howard and the music is a nice extra. But they wouldn’t be paying what they pay for just the music. It’s a different world out there now, and why pay for Sirius when my smartphone (well not mine, but you get the point) has built in wifi and I can go to Pandora for free?

In the end, it’s probably for not. While Mutt (the owner of SFN) and his mods worked to control some of the insanity that was going on.  While there is http://realbubba.boardhost.com/index.php which I work with somewhat, unfortunately for Howard there is already SternFanSNetwork.com which has none of the mods getting rid of anything. It’s basically what SFN was but completely insane given how Howard got SFN taken down. Silencing the voice of people is never a good idea.

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By Mark D, October 12, 2011 1:45 pm

I really, really thought I was done with the incredible downfall of Bubba The Love Sponge, AKA Bubba Clem or BTLS. But my last post actually got the attention of BTLS executive producer (and candidate for St. Petersburg City Council) and he took time out of his busy day to comment on my blog.

This is Brent (for real). This post is a flat out lie. I’ve never asked anything about me be pulled, EVER. Only libel will be pulled and we have attorneys d

- attorneys that handle libel. This op/Ed is a complete LIE. SFN has their own mods. BTW, only government can censor. Read the Bill of Rights. Plenty of false, malicious things are said about me and my family. I wouldn’t have the time to police such foolishness! Save the wishing for our death. We’ll be here f

For many years to come…So keep on Hating, it’s all your good at!!

So you could imagine my shock today when I went to SFN and discovered that the BTLS forum was missing. I took a quick look around the forums and found this message from SFN Owner/Admin Mutt

The Bubba the Love Sponge Show has requested that I close the Bubba forum so don’t get all shitty w/ me saying how I abandoned the show or something. They wanted it down, so it’s down. and before you say nobody posted in there anyway, it’s true that compared to the Howard forum it was slow but compared to other places on the net, it was actually pretty active. To those of you that posted there, sorry. I’m sad to see them off Sirius & sad to see the darkside close down.

The problem in all of this is that Bubba and his crew should be above all of this. Brent found my blog, and instead of realizing it was totally inconsequential to them decided to fight back. Since I made that post originally in July it’s been seen by a total of 117 people. It averaged 1 hit a day for the last 3 months, and is averaging 3 hits a day for this months. No one really cares what I say. No one wants my opinion. Hell I have barely 100 twitter followers. Bubba himself has 75K followers, Brent 10K. Just for reference I was recently celebrating this blog getting over 3,000 views last month. For comparison all of last year I only totaled 5K views. On the year I barely have 22K views.

It’s obvious no one can control Bubba at this point, and he is out of control and stupid while on social networks. He recently flipped out on Twitter and bashed his wife for having lunch with someone critical of the show. That someone was the infamous Ludlow Lebron. Now there’s not even any proof that she actually had lunch with him and it was possible that she just said that to get a rise out of him. But after attacking her and threatening people, Bubba claimed that his twitter was hacked and the tweets disappeared. The tweets though continued to stay on Bubba’s facebook which he has brilliantly linked to his twitter. Lud has been very critical of Bubba, but hasn’t stepped the line as far as anyone can tell. That didn’t stop Bubba from posting an edited business card of someone from the Florida Cybercrimes Unit.

A quick google shows that there is a Cybercrimes unit in Tampa, but it’s a Child Predator Cybercrimes unit. As anyone that’s been on the internet for an amount of time knows, the last thing you do is threaten to involve the “Internet Police” with someone. But Bubba doesn’t get that he’s too big to be arguing, replying and listening to Ludlow Lebron and the SFN Bubba forum. Because in the end, the truth hurts. Bubba isn’t attacking/taking down criticism because it’s libel and slander, but because what people are saying is true. He can’t handle that he is his own worst enemy. That spending time doing anything but paying attention to your wife is never a good idea.  Especially when she’s so far out of your league.

The other truth that Bubba can’t stand is that he basically got conned by his agent. Someone mentioned recently that Bubba’s IO deal is almost totally in stocks. He owns such a large amount of IO stocks that if he tried to sell them, it would depress the price of the stock even more. So it’s no surprise that despite being on the board of IO and being the premier talent, Bubba treats the show as a bastard child. Even worse was the con job he and Tom Bean pulled on the Early Enlisters, getting them to drop 300 bucks for a lifetime subscription and now there’s nothing to be subscribed too. Bubba or IO or both of them finally figured out that no one was going to pay extra for him and made it free. They also offered EEs a pro-rated refund, but good luck getting that back considering the last IO financial report said they would run out of funds by the next quarter unless something big changed.

The more Bubba attempts to be a big shot, the more he proves he’s out of his league in almost every way. Look, I’m not even anywhere near as popular as him, but when someone shit talks me I either ignore them or laugh at it. You need to have a thick skin, and it’s obvious now that Bubba doesn’t.

Comments (6)

By Mark D, July 17, 2011 10:50 am

Actually, this isn’t so much Bubba but Brent, according to the people over at the Stern Fan Network. You see, a few days ago someone from SFN linked to my Stupidity Overflowth rant and posted it over there. I can tell when this happens because WordPress his this nice little stats thing that tells the user when someone follows a link to their page. I added a few comments to the post before I fell asleep that morning. A few hours later I noticed the post was gone. Thankfully Google still has a cache of it here to prove it existed.

Well the user who originally posted the link to the Stupidity Overflowth blog and has written a lot of other stuff about Bubba is now in SFN purgatory labelled as a hater. In a thread discussing it, users mention that Brent, the BTLS show producer actually watches the board and gets stuff pulled down. The user who got tagged as a hater had made a post calling out Brent which magically disappeared before he got tagged. So basically the BTLS people are so desperate as to care what people say about them on a near dead message board and call in favors.

It’s amazing how far they have fallen. I mean they aren’t even on the Howard channels at all and they are calling in favors to get stuff deleted and removed. Maybe instead of surfing SFN for any negative comments, they should be working on the show. Especially since all signs point to Bubba being busy burning yet another Bridge, as it seems like Cox won’t renew his contract at the end of the year.This is probably the last time I even bother to write about him. Given a second (and most likely 20th) chance in radio, he continues to do what he does best: Burn Bridges. It’s always everyone’s fault but his own. When he’s in his bunker, broadcasting to a handful of truckers on RadioIO, right before the Feds bust in and shut it down for being a pump and dump stock scam, I wonder if he’ll have any regrets. Most likely he’ll just blame Tom Bean.

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By Mark D, April 5, 2011 9:35 pm

For those of you coming from SFN, I was a member of the Bubba boards. But I got banned from SFN for speaking my mind about Bubba and talking back to Heatherwiz. I find it funny now that basically everything I argued with Wiz about, I was right about. I could probably return to SFN now, and no one would care. But once I get banned enough from somewhere I get the point.

I’ve mentioned Bubba The Love Sponge before, basically he screwed over all his fans on Sirius two years ago in order to get a new deal. It’s been two years, and Bubba’s contract (which simply consisted of them rebroadcasting his over the air morning show) wasn’t renewed. Supposedly Sirius was only offering him 200K for the show, which was half of what they had paid in the 2 year contract. Bubba meanwhile wasn’t exactly negotiating in good faith, as his website had a countdown to the “Next Evolution” whose end coincided with his contract being up.

Bubba has now signed with RadioIO, a company almost no one has heard of. But it isn’t exactly surprising, given that his agent Tom Bean is the CEO of RadioIO’s parent company. One must question if Bubba even got fair value, given that his agent was negotiating with himself. Tom Bean doesn’t exactly come off as the most ethic person, given his status as a personal injury lawyer. He’s also infamous for being a member of a lot of Pump and Dump scams relating to stocks. Interestingly IO World Media (RadioIO’s parent company) was a penny stock for most of last year, until rumors started circulating that Bubba was going to IO in late October. At around the same time Tom Bean filed papers to issue 200K more shares.

IO then reached a 52 week high on January 11th of 68 cents. Meaning if somehow had bought shares when it was still a penny or even up to 5 cents they would have made back 10 times what they spent at the least. IO spiked again at about 50ish cents in late Jan, and has been downhill ever since and is at roughly 28 cents lately. Even the 28 cents is a pretty big gain for a relatively unknown company that was trading for pennies.

Here’s where it gets a little more interesting, Bubba was offering “early enlisters” who paid 300 bucks would get 3 years of service, a discount on Bubba Raw and a “Golden Ticket” which would make up the real difference for the early enlisters since if you just paid the monthly fee of 9.95 it would come out to about 350 bucks. His fans quickly figured out that the Golden Ticket would be stock, which might explain the sudden upswing in Jan.

Even more amazing though is that RadioIO offered Bubba’s show (he broadcasts for 2 hours after his radio broadcast is over) for free until March. Multiple times during the free preview Bubba said that the show was not full on everything it could be, including one reference to the show being a 2/10. But he assured listeners that as soon as the free preview was over the show would be a 10/10. So basically you had to show faith that someone who phoned it in for his last 2 years on Sirius (since most listeners would be coming from Sirius and not have him locally) and then proceeded to purposely have half assed shows for 2 months was going to turn it on once you had to subscribe to him. I gave him a listen, and there was still almost no reason to listen to him. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be as crazy as possible while it was free so people would want to continue to listen?

People on the Stern Fan Network Bubba board have been able to view the server stats for RadioIO and it’s not looking pretty for most of the live shows being broadcast. People just don’t care that much about him or the crew of people he has doing shows. Ironically most of the shows other then his are done by his friends. Remember this is Bubba who complained that Sirius wasn’t bringing in professional broadcasters, now letting his friends on the air most likely due to them working for free.

So Bubba left Sirius, joined his shady Agents shady company and might be involved in pump and dump stock deals. I think if he had half a brain in his head he would have kept doing live shows on Sirius and making money off the merch. But hey, when you spend almost as much time bashing a company as you do working for them, you can’t expect to get a raise. I don’t think anyone has done more in their career to literally cut off their own nose to spite their face.

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By Mark D, July 21, 2010 1:43 pm

I get some interesting emails. Might as well show the world my responses to them.

To: Webmaster

From:
S O

Message:
Hi Mark,

We would love to share with you an article that we just posted on our
own blog! “10 Reasons Satellite Radio Rocks”
(http://www.satellitedish.org/blog/2010/10-reasons-satellite-radio-rocks/)
would be an interesting story for your readers to check out and
discuss on your blog, so we hope you will consider sharing it!

Thanks so much for your time, and have a wonderful day!
S O

So let’s start discussing Satellite radio! Join the fun in my comments! It was obvious whoever sent this just googled satellite radio and since that’s one of my tags and categories this blog came up. So here’s my reply.

Not sure how you came across my blog, but you could have at least took the time to read one of my posts about Satellite radio. The fact that your “10 Reasons Satellite Radio Rocks” doesn’t include Uncensored Howard Stern is just crazy. Not only that, but the continual mistreatment of Sirius customers is horrible. Why is there a “best of XM/Sirius” package when obviously they can cross broadcast as has been proven by their ability to cross broadcast the music stations. The move to bleed customers dry once the Merger was approved made them look like complete dicks.

Thank you very much, and I’m sure if you drive a lot or travel long distances, Satellite radio does rock. However for those who just want an alternative to the radio (ask me how well my Stilleto 2 works) are bound to be disappointed. I can’t find any reason to post your article, along with the fact that despite 140+ blog posts I only have a total of 29 comments, half of them mine, mean it won’t start a discussion anyway.