SiriusXM and Mel Karmazin, Go Fuck Yourselves

The BBQ Pit
1

Okay. This is it. The email I got is the last straw. There is no fucking way I am paying an additional $3 a month to stream online. You bastards are already charging me $2 just to send me a paper bill (which I haven’t fixed yet because I was deciding whether or not to keep the service after the merger kicked in.)

I’ve had an XM SkyFi in my car since June 2004. I streamed a lot when it became available. I loved being able to drive for hours and hours without ever losing a signal. I worried about how I would work the current radio and everything when I finally decide to get a new car. I loved how I could just turn it on and hear the stuff I wanted, without commercials, and without having to fumble around with my iPod. I loved being able to stream the music online without having to worry about getting a satellite signal. I signed up as soon as I could for the Best of Sirius package when it became available. And for a while, maybe a month, I was happy. I still had the XM music service programming I loved and Sirius NFL for a yearly cost of less than a month of NFL Sunday Ticket.

And then you bastards went and got rid of the XM music entirely. Lucy became the shitty Lithium and the hilarious XM Saturday Night was gone. Ethel became Alt Nation. Fred became New Wave. Top Tracks became Classic Vinyl, but that’s not much of an improvement because I hate the fucking DJs. I’m not mad at you about the loss of The System because it came through Worldspace, just like I wasn’t really mad at you when MSNBC stopped providing an audio stream years ago. But XM had the better fucking programming and you, you stupid fucking terrestrial-radio oriented Mel Karmazin either didn’t see that or didn’t recognize it. XM customers got nothing but the shitty end of the merger.

And then there’s the gouging. I’ve already mentioned some of it. If I still had my XM programming, I’d probably be willing to continue to pay $240 a year for satellite radio. Hell, I might even pay $3 for the online streaming. But know what I’m going to do instead? I’m going to look into getting a Slacker G2. And if I don’t like what I see through Slacker, I’m getting myself a shiny new iPod. The $200 I would have given you this year will go a long way to either a new iPod classic or an iPod touch. Hell, if I get the touch, I can get the Slacker app as well and don’t need the G2.

So that’s it. Satellite radio is dead to me. I hope you fail utterly and get your hardware bought by EchoStar. I will not take 3 months for $4.99. I will not take 3 months for free. I’m just going to cancel and hope that some day, maybe, the XM I knew and loved will come back.

2

I’m on the bubble right now. My subscription is up next month. The decades channels have been destroyed, it’s all top 20 hits now. I liked the fact that you got occasional one hit wonders and “lost hits” and about once an hour, one of those “well the first three singles off the album were hits, let’s try a fourth” songs that didn’t crack the top 20 but were good anyway. I liked that sometimes when I put on 80s on 8 or 90s on 9, I might hear a song that I didn’t know all the lyrics to.

Now, not only is it Top 20, it’s an amazingly American top 20, somehow after spending 15 hours this past week in my car listening to 80s on 8, I’ve heard no Eurythmics, no Cure, no Duran Duran, no Police/Sting, but I heard “Mickey” twice, every single “hit” by the Hooters and 4 different ZZ Top songs. And ZZ Top? Not nearly so interesting without the videos with the high-heeled girls and that sweet car.

Also, they used to have a station that was all Pittsburgh traffic and weather, on a loop. Every 45 seconds, they looped the current weather and traffic conditions. (There were a number of cities that had their own dedicated station.) If you pressed the info button, it would tell you what the temperature was, as reported at the weather station in that city. Now they’ve merged Pittsburgh with Minneapolis, taken away the on-screen temperature display, and you have to wait up to two minutes to hear the local traffic. What good is it to me to hear the traffic and weather in Minneapolis?

And the ads have gotten longer and stupider.

But on the flip side, there’s BBC 1, time-shifted so that you hear what aired at 8 a.m. in the UK at 8 a.m. here. (Of course, a week ago this meant that you could get the info about the songs as they played like on the XM native stations, but that’s gone away now as well.) There’s BBC World Radio. There’s POTUS Politics. There’s still XMPR with Bob Edwards and Prairie Home Companion, though I guess they may change the name now. There’s the CNN simulcast. There’s the Oprah station, which is mostly ridiculous but does have the Nate Berkus show. (I love Nate). I’m just not sure if all of that is worth $150 a year, especially since I’m driving less these days, and never really got into streaming via my computer, and don’t want to now if I’m going to have to pay more for it.

It’s such a quandary, but yeah, they’ve fucked it up pretty badly in a lot of ways, and I think the suck is just going to keep on coming. Hard choices to make.

3

I’ve always had Sirius instead of XM, so I didn’t really notice much change. The problem I’ve always had with them, though, is that I don’t think they’re taking advantage of the nature of the service. I subscribe so I won’t have to listen to all the crap on regular radio. I expected the DJs to occasionally give some info on the music they were playing, but otherwise keep their mouths shut. Unfortunately, Sirius has the most annoying DJs I’ve ever heard. They’re not funny, they’re not clever, and they never shut up. I was hoping at least that might change with the merger, but it seems it was mostly the XM folks who got the boot. I’ve known several people who dropped their subscriptions when they found out that no commercials didn’t mean no (or at least limited) talk on the music stations. I would’ve dropped mine if I hadn’t been unknowingly signed up for automatic renewal. My subscription runs until July or August.

4

I have absolutely zero problems with the new system. Everything I listen to has remained the same or gotten better, and I now get Sirius stations I like, such as Radio Margaritaville and the E Street Channel.

5

I use the online streaming when I work at home so I can listen to POTUS and Talk Left. But I’ll find something else to listen to because I’m not paying them one thin dime for this particular service.

I loved Sirius, especially since I live in an area where broadcast talk radio is all Rush and Dr. Laura. I turned the car receiver off last spring to save money and missed it so much that my husband got me a Sirius gift card for Christmas so I could listen in the car again. But I’m really tired of them nickel-and-diming me, including the $2 for paper statements. I’ll probably just let the subscription expire this time and hope that my area broadcast stations figure out that there’s an audience for more than the hard-righties out here.

6

If you get a touch or an iphone, be sure to check out Pandora Radio:

It’s free. It lets you stream music according to your own tastes. You can create ‘channel’ around a song or an artist and then Pandora recommends other songs for you. You need an internet connection so a touch would need to be in a wifi network but it’s a pretty cool service, especially with the iphone’s built in internet.

7

They’ll keep me, if for no other reason than Ron & Fez, 12-3. I did today, however, cancel one of my two radios and when they asked why, I simply told them that since I tend to listen online most of all, and since it was no longer free, I was going to correct it by removing one radio.

If Ron & Fez ever vanish though, I will have nary a qualm about being done with them altogether.

8

When I first got XM (2 weeks after their launch in late 2001), it was AWESOME! Since then the following stations, among them my very favorites, were taken away:

Special X
MusicLab
Beyond Jazz
Fine Tuning
Cinemagic

So I quit satellite radio back in November.

If they want me back, at least a couple of those have to return. I am not holding my breath. Fuck them.

9

Fuck the Feds for letting the merger take place in the first place.

10

I bought it pretty much for Stern and the Latin stations, and I’m ticked that they reduced their Latin stations to one crap station that only ever plays reggeaton. I moved to Chicago from DC and, I’m sorry to say, the talk and Latin radio suck even worse than what they’re offering on terrestrial so I don’t see myself giving it up in the near future.

At least this way I can keep my mind off my 72 mile round-trip commute.

11

We got Sirius for Stern, but I never listen in anymore; his show was much better on terrestrial radio. For now, were going to keep our satellite radios on, only because Orlando radio is torture to listen to.

Now that there are radios that receive both services, I think the smart thing to do for them would be to offer one of the bands free, perhaps leasing out to ClearChannel or CBS, while keeping the other band for subscription. There will always be a market for those of us who hate commercials and censorship.

12

I’m pretty much the same as you. I listen to Opie and Anthony, then Ron and Fez, and then switch to Dr. Laura.

I think I just like radio shows who are hostle to callers.

13

Oh, God, yes. I do like the Phillips Phile, though.

I love the merger because it gave me Sirius NFL service (my car came with an XM receiver). I hate the merger because they took away The Boneyard. The Sirius (non-hardcore) metal station, “Hair Nation”, is abso-fucking-lutely terrible. It’s all Sunset Strip glam bands, all the time- and not even the good ones!

Plus, why the fuck can’t a satellite service with 1,000,000 bloody stations not have a single synth-rock station?

14

Call them up and tell them you’re quitting.

Seriously, (Siriusly?), call them up. They’re desperate for business at this point. When I first got my XM service, I got the $7/month deal (valid for only one year). The next year, they sent me a letter to let me know I was going up to the $12/year deal that everyone else has. I called 'em up and told 'em that it wasn’t worth that much to me.

They caved easily, gave me the $7/mo deal again.

The next year, the same thing- they threaten to raise my cost, I call their bluff, I go back to cheap XM. This year, it was even easier- I just told the first person I talked to that I wanted to cancel, and why… and she transferred me over to a supervisor who gave me the deal again (and told me to do the same, again, next year!).

You’ve got a lot of power in this situation.

15

The Boneyard is back, after a brief stint as AC/DC radio. It’s one of the few XM stations to survive. Try the above mentioned Pandora.com. You’ll soon be in synth-rock heaven.

16

Maybe on the XM side. I tried this with Sirius and got squat.

Also, I heard on Stern this AM that they might get taken over by EchoStar? :eek:

17

R.I.P. XM44
We listened to Fred on 44 almost exclusively. We enjoyed it, although I tended to wander around the dial and try different things here and there, but my wife had the unit on all day at home and in the car. Lucy, Ethel, XMKids, Comedy, FineTuning were all on our favourites. XMKids (now KidsPlaceLive) is the only one that seemed to come out unscathed.

Good lord, 1st Wave blows chunks! Stupid ass DJs and terrible programming. I wanted to send a note to XM about the programming when it was Fred, because I felt that the repeat factor was a little high for those of us with the same station tuned in 8AM-midnight. Boy was I proven wrong. We were being spoiled by the programming on Fred. It’s funny, our unit can save the artist name of our favourites and beeps when they are played on any station. It used to beep a couple times an hour (mostly Nine Inch Nails). Now it alerts us once every couple of hours.

It’s tough to find reasons to stay with the service.

1st Wave is particularly annoying:
1) What is the point of having the DJs? They lend nothing to the channel. Thanks for telling us that you just played The Cure, and that you’ll play it again in 20 minutes because Jeanie from Wisconsin just sent an email requesting them.
2) What is the point of Madison? Insipid.
3) Repeat factor is WAY too high. Sure Depeche Mode was a big part of the new wave music scene, but not enough to devote 3 songs an hour…every hour…
4) Itty bitty playlist. Why are they playing the same songs every day? They have at least a decade of music to select from.
5) Darkwave. WTF? This is music that Fred used to play all the time, and now it is relegated to 11-1 on Sunday night. Once in a while they’ll play a song like Eighties by Killing Joke and tell us that they are throwing us a bone since we can’t wait for the shitty 2-hour window.

We got XM a few years ago and loved it. I heard that they had deeper playlists, but didn’t have any real experience with it. I now understand the poor quality of programming that they are producing.
I still can’t understand the fanboys of Sirius. They seem to show up and announce ‘SIRIUS FTW!’. The music programming is unbelievably lame. I understand that a lot of people followed Stern, but I guess I just don’t get the fervor for the poor music programming.

What alternatives are there? I can’t go back to terrestrial radio!

I’ve been looking for something to replace it. The Slacker G2 is very tempting, but living in Canada is apparently verboten for Slacker fans. There are a couple of user-programmed stations on Slacker that are trying to recreate Fred. I need to see if some sort of IP anonymizer service would allow us to grab the content. Anyone have any ideas?

Does the iTouch allow loading up Pandora, Slacker, or Last.FM tunes so we can take it on the road with us? I don’t think we can afford a data plan for an iPhone to stream the media when we are out and about.
Oh, yeah, XM Canada is a separate business from XM (US) and Sirius Canada, so we are simply getting the signal passed through to us. I don’t think XM Canada can do anything about the programming any more. They used to bend over backwards to have the numbers up, but apparently they are hurting for money and can’t afford to offer the cheap deals and will let people walk away.

18

I just read that Siriius/XM just filed for bankruptcy. Is this the end of satellite radio? Say it aint so!

19

Total agreement cantara. I’ve been an XM subscriber forever and a day, and have been a Fred listener from way back. Back before it was the only alternative channel on the band that played old stuff (as opposed to Ethel). Then it switched to alternative deep tracks when they added Lucy. Still a great channel.

Now? Same songs every three or so hours. I like Depeche Mode well enough, but they had other songs besides “Just Can’t Get Enough”. They seem to lock into one song by an artist, and that’s all you’re gonna hear.

No more One Revolution around the Sun, which was a great show. Or Surface Noise.

Killing Fred is as bad as when Special X died all those years ago.

20

Unlikely, at least for now. They’re filing Chapter 11, as I recall- which means they basically stay in business. They’ll probably end up with a new owner.

Of course, after that, who knows?

I do kind of think that satellite radio is a bit of a dead end- the idea of having to buy equipment and THEN having to pay for a monthly service probably scares a lot of people away. I know that I would’ve never have gotten XM had it not come with my Honda Element.

If only we could get free WiFi everywhere. Internet radio would be much, much better.