It's the end of an era. Dr. Demento will still be heard via a streaming Internet show but after forty-some-odd years, he's leaving conventional radio. This article has all the details…and I don't think it gives nearly enough credit to what the good doctor has done for many, many careers. I also don't think it properly summarizes the reasons that his program lost listeners the last decade or so. I think some of it was a period when he was a bit too generous (I thought) in playing the works of new wanna-be recording artists. The show morphed from being a celebration of established successes in the world of comedy and novelty records to being a showcase for aspiring Weird Als. There should be a place for such works but I don't think that's what folks wanted when they tuned in to Dr. D. They wanted Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer and Spike Jones, as well as records that were unintentionally funny.
The other problem (again, I thought) was that certain CD releases and Internet MP3 swapping have made that material fairly easy to acquire, slap on your computer and play whenever you feel like it. The irony, of course, is that the reason such recordings are now so readily available is that one man kept them alive and popular. Dr. Demento isn't going away. It's kind of like radio has gone away from him…