Sebastian Maniscalco isn’t generally viewed as a particularly controversial comic — but he’s found himself in the hot seat this week, scrutinized over a recent SiriusXM changeover in which he’s prominently involved.
Earlier this year, as we first reported, SiriusXM replaced its long-running Raw Comedy channel (Channel 99) with Sebastian Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio, a 24/7 branded channel centered on Maniscalco and his show with Pete Correale. As laid out in a piece by nonprofit Stand Up for Stand Up, the change has been harmful to working-class comics who depended on Raw Dog airplay and the royalties that come with it. What’s happened, they’ve shown, is that over 75% of total plays have become concentrated among the industry’s upper echelon of comics — living and dead — severely impacting passive residual income going to comics at lower levels.
Maniscalco’s new channel “is crushing middle class comedians who rely on payments from the company to pad income,” wrote comedian Matt Ruby in a Monday installment of his Substack Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian. “Now some are fighting back. (Thanks to them!)”
Ruby linked to social posts from comics including Liz Miele and Greg Stone, who lay out the issue in full.
“This year, the Raw channel on SiriusXM became Sebastian Maniscalco’s channel. Great. Fine. Celebrities have taken over channels before. Never been an issue,” Miele says in a video posted to Instagram (view it here.)
“The problem is,” Miele explains, “Raw went from playing 800 working class comedians to now playing less than 300 celebrity comedians like Joan Rivers, Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, Norm Macdonald. Just dead comic, dead comic, dead comic, and then a plethora of very famous alive comedians that might not even know about this extra income that they’re about to receive.”
In contrast, Miele said, “every workin- class comedian that has been kicked off the channel is quite aware” of the change, “and it is devastating. Because of this action, hundreds of comedians will no longer be able to have these royalties. Working class comedians, people that only make money on the road, that have no safety net, that depend on this money to just survive, are going from having that money to nothing.”
Previously, Miele said, Maniscalco was perhaps unaware of the impact that his SiriusXM rebrand is having on the broader comedy community. “But now you know, and you can help us. You can fix this. We would love to be reincorporated into the channel and start getting the streams and plays that we were getting before you took it over.”
Deadline has reached out to reps for SiriusXM and Maniscalco for comment; we’ll update the story if and when statements come in.
