- Forum Clout
- 33,907
I'm doing this off the top of my head, so I may have some dates wrong:
Basically in the mid 90s, the radio market was deregulated. This allowed corporations to buy up hundreds of radio stations. Once they'd done that, they were swimming in money, because they had tons and tons and tons of redundancies. Imaging purchasing a hundred radio stations, firing 98% of the staff, and then replacing it with syndicated content.
Since they'd gone from paying the salaries of thousands of employees to hundreds, all of the profits got concentrated in an arms races to hire the hosts with the biggest numbaz.
From 2000 to 2005, you had nobodies like Mancow and Don and Mike making seven figures. Danny Ross has questioned whether Cumia was making seven figures. But it's farely easy to "suss out" what radio personalities were making during that era, because some of them got divorced and that information was made public in the divorce. For instance, Danny Bonaduce was second mic on the Adam Carolla show, and was making $500K a year: https://people.com/celebrity/danny-bonaduce-to-pay-16000-monthly-in-divorce-agreement/
Bonaduce made an additional $280K a year from his other job. (Both were part time, obviously.)
Bonaduce was never even remotely as popular as Opie and Anthony, so do the math.
And before someone says "maybe Bonaduce is just a really good negotiator", keep in mind that Opie and Anthony, Adam Carolla, Jim Norton, Jimmy Kimmel and Danny Bonaduce all had the same agent, James "Baby Doll" Dixon: https://adamcarolla.com/jon-stewart-james-babydoll-dixon-and-joshua-bell/
(That's part of the reason that the quality of Cumia and Carolla's guests shit the bed, Dixon eventually dropped both of them.)
Dixon on the right
If anyone remembers Opie's fake story about Adam Carolla dissing him in person, the entire reason he was allowed into the studio was because they had the same agent.
Naturally, the gravy train wouldn't last forever. But if you were on the radio from 2000 until 2005, and especially if you were syndicated nationwide, you were making money hand over fist.
It's a little bit ironic that Opie and Anthony contributed to their own demise by helping guys like Joe Rogan and Marc Maron make a name for themselves. If it wasn't for O&A, I doubt Maron would have ever had a top ten podcast.
Rogan already had a career when he started showing up on O&A, but his pivot to doing comedy full time was hardly setting the world on fire. I saw Maron play a show in Hollywood in 2006 and there were about 25 people in the room, with a capacity of about 200.
That makes sense.
I think Vince McMahon did something similar with wrestling.
Any random homeless guy could have brought far more entertainment to the show 
Sal was cringe and made me want to punch walls, child 
true class
