Comedian Liz Miele just lost about a quarter of her income, and she’s not alone.
SiriusXM has axed its Raw Comedy/Raw Dog channel, which featured a rotating roster of more than 800 comics, and replaced it with a new channel owned by A-list comedian Sebastian Maniscalco.
Now, Miele and hundreds of working-class comedians have lost a key source of income and exposure, while wealthy celebrity comics take up their airspace.
“Last year was so financially bad for me that I stayed afloat because of Sirius XM,” the L.A.-based comedian told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“I have friends that are taking care of sick parents and can’t be on the road. I have a friend that just had a baby, and this is their maternity leave …. This [was] helping hundreds and hundreds of comedians make ends meet.”
Maniscalco and SiriusXM have promised the new channel will create space for comedians at different stages of their careers.
But the numbers tell a different story, says industry advocacy group Stand Up for Standup.
Before the takeover, Raw Comedy regularly played more than 800 comedians a month, the group says, each earning $15 US in royalties for every “spin” of their material.
‘A concentration of wealth’
But the rebranded channel only featured 275 comedians last month, according to the advocacy group, with more than 75 per cent of plays going to the top 50 artists, including powerhouse comics like Chris Rock, Kevin Hart and Jim Gaffigan.
Several dead comedians, including Joan Rivers and Bob Newhart, are also in rotation.
“It’s a concentration of wealth,” said Miele, who used to be one of the channel’s top performers.
“It used to be a variety of comedians making a decent amount of money. And now it’s a small group of comedians making a lot of money. And these comedians don’t need it.”
Comedian Liz Miele used to be one of the top-played comedians on Sirius XM’s Raw Comedy/Raw Dog. (Jim Cambridge)
Without spaces like SiriusXM, she says future generations won’t get a chance to break through like Maniscalco did.
“We don’t have a lot of nepo babies the way Hollywood does,” she said. “For the most part, everybody was a person that wasn’t affiliated with show business, decided to try stand-up … and then a select few kind of blow up.”
Canadian comedians take a hit
Toronto comedian Danish Anwar says he used to make anywhere from $1,000 to $3,500 a month in royalties from Raw Comedy. Now that’s dropped by 30 to 40 per cent.
He says he still earns income from his production company, Toronto Comedy All Stars, but many of his colleagues are in a different position.
Toronto comedian Danish Anwar says comics need to join forces as the industry faces threats from consolidation and AI. (Ramy Arida)
“They would have put in a decade’s worth of material into an album, probably spent several thousand dollars themselves to get it on Sirius XM and had now become what I would call, like, the middle class of comedy through those residuals,” he said.
“That is now gone.”
He says many Canadian comics trying to build careers in the U.S. are dependent on SiriusXM royalties to keep their work visas.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them have to move back here,” he said.
Maniscalco says it wasn’t his call
Several high-profile comedians — including Patton Oswalt, Michelle Wolf and Marc Maron — have called on Maniscalco to ensure up-and-coming comedians have a place to develop their careers.
“Get those young comedians back on the SiriusXM channel. Let them get those cheques. Let them keep working. Let them keep coming up,” Oswalt said in an Instagram video. “It keeps the profession that we’re in dynamic and fun.”
Patton Oswalt, seen here at the SiriusXM studios in New York City in 2024, is one of the more famous comedians speaking out about the station’s decision to axe hundreds of working comics from Channel 99, formerly known as Raw Comedy/Raw Dog. (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
Maniscalco responded to the backlash with his own video on Wednesday, saying he had nothing to do with the decision to kill Raw Comedy and cut the channel’s roster.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for SiriusXM confirmed it made the choice to axe Raw Comedy before Maniscalco joined the company, citing the channel’s “underperformance.”
“While the challenges facing working comedians are bigger than any one person or decision, we remain committed, as we have for more than two decades, to making SiriusXM and Sebastian Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio a place where comedians at every stage of their careers can be heard,” the statement reads.
In his video, posted as an Instagram story, Maniscalco vows to work with SiriusXM to carve out space on his channel for “a variety of different voices in stand-up comedy from emerging to established.”
“I know how hard the grind is. Believe me, I’ve been there,” he said.
Anwar says he’ll believe it when he sees it.
“Statements are nice, but statements don’t pay my bills,” he said. “I can’t take Sebastian Maniscalco’s video, his story, to No Frills and get bananas for that.”
A Canadian case study
Toronto-born comedian Steph Tolev is calling on her U.S. colleagues to take a page out of Canadian comedy history.
She was one of many comedians who spoke out in 2019 when SiriusXM’s Canada Laughs channel was taken over by Just For Laughs, and dropped its all-Canadian lineup. Just For Laughs later reversed the decision and issued an apology.
“We all chimed in and said something and they gave us our plays back,” she said in a video posted to Facebook. “So guess what? It works, the power of the people.”
Comedian Steph Tolev says she’s not impacted by the SiriusXM shakeup, but she stands by comedians who are and calls on them to speak out to pressure the station to reverse its decision. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Anwar isn’t optimistic this tactic will work with a U.S. company. Still, he says, the moment calls for solidarity — something that isn’t easy to come by in the comedy industry.
“Maybe a little more unity around things like pay, around treatment, labour practices, things like that, which are very poor in the industry. So that could be a silver lining,” he said.
“Aside from that, from a financial perspective, we just got nuked. We completely got nuked.”
