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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