Beth and I were talking yesterday morning and I did some quick math with her. I said that if XM were to lose 40,000 subs (a mere 2 percent of their estimated audience of 2,000,000), then XM stood to lose 6.2 million dollars a year just because of Opie and Anthony defections.

Today, I saw this on Crunchgear:

Rumors, utter utter rumors, suggest that between 19,000 and 38,000 subscriptions were canceled as of yesterday in response to the radio duo’s suspension. That works out to about 20,000 subs killed for each of the past two days. Add that to the many XM units still being destroyed and XM certainly must be feeling the heat as a result of punishing the duo.

While it is a rumor, it’s worthy of note that it takes at least 2 hours now to cancel an account. When you think about the capacity of an XM call center, and how it must be for any call center to try and cope with enough calls to push hold times into the 2 hour range, you understand that this isn’t a joke for many people.

XM, you screwed with the wrong people and no amount of “free months” is going to fix it. And if you think about it, this is only because of a suspension. Imagine if the situation progresses and they’re fired?

O&A have a fiercely loyal listener base. If their subs are at 2,000,000, then XM can expect to lose $312,000,000 a year if every sub pays $13 a month (the standard rate for one XM radio).