Deep Tracks is good as they play B-sides and album tracks which probably haven’t been played on radio since the 1970s or at all. I used to hear songs on there that I only remember from playing the record when I was a kid.
The Loft. Bluesville. And maybe not for everyone in this thread but Symphony.
They do, but OTOH, some stuff is kinda main stream. But then I wonder if it’s actually main stream or if it’s just because I’m sooo familiar with that artist that.
Looking at their playlist. I see the played Shine On You Crazy Diamond. I know that song inside and out, but I suppose the casual PF listener might not. Rock Around The Clock…that’s not a Deep Track. Hey Tonight, Little Wing, those aren’t.
Then there’s more stuff on there that I know only because I’m listen to so much music by that particular artist (for example, Girl On LSD-Tom Petty).
So, some are, some aren’t.
What was funny, was when I started listening to it the DJ said something like “We don’t just play songs, we play careers”, which was the exact same thing my local radio station would say right before they played, what they called a “Deep Cut”. I don’t know if that’s a common phrase for DJs to say, of if my radio station and that one are somehow related.
Lastly, I really like Tom Petty’s Burried Treasure. That’s worth a listen if you haven’t heard it yet.
Bob Dylan has/had one too, on a different station. The music he plays is good, listening to him talk is just awful, not his voice, but the writing for the show just sucks, it’s almost embarrassing. I normally change it when the songs are over and come when I think he’s done talking.
That reminds me, I was at a local restaurant waiting for my (carry out) food and recognized the music as XM Cinamagic. I’m not sure how I knew it, as I’d only surfed past the station, but I got back in my car and the same ‘song’ was on.
There have been several threads about satellite radio, both before and after the merger. It’s like a Vegas buffet… from the door and the cashier’s stand it looks like unlimited selection of everything you can imagine; after a first pass you find it’s pretty much all mashed potatoes. I enabled the XM system in my Odyssey when we drove across country, and we listened to a dozen channels all the way across (far preferable to a few CDs or endlessly trying to find decent stations as you move along). The playlists prove to be very short and it all seems to be oriented towards first-month users, playing stuff that will suck people in and nothing else.
The poster channel for me was the Jimmy Buffett one - I was looking forward to hearing a lot of the back-album stuff from the man’s 1000+ repertoire… but no. It was the big four or five radio cuts, but in one concert, live or special-guest version after another. I guess there are Parrotheads out there like Deadheads, who just can’t get enough of the nuances JB puts on “Margaritaville” from concert to concert, but…
Pretty much the same for the other channels, especially the comedy ones. The third time you hear a routine in two days of sporadic listening, you’re done.
Does the Margaritaville only play Jimmy stuff? Some of those staions, like, say, Willie’s Roadhouse play plenty of other artists as well. We’ve talked about this subject before.
Just to quickly rehash it…A few years back they had a Led Zeppelin channel. Led Zeppelin has (I think) 10 albums, they’ve covered other songs, countless artists have covered their music, hours upon hours of interviews, who knows how many lives songs and entire concerts have been recorded. Live at the Greek with Jimmy Page and The Black Crowes is amazing (saw them live in Milwaukee). Robert Plant has both solo work and work with Alison Krauss, Jimi Page has work with other people, John Paul Jones has some solo albums
But every time I turned it on it was Dazed and Confused or Stairway to Heaven or a handful of other songs. I’ll bet a good producer could have dug up 500-1000 hours of material but they probably rotated though 25 songs and ended up cutting the special short. It was supposed to run for like 6 weeks and after 2 or 3 it was gone.
The Pink Floyd station was great it ran for a month, they played stuff I wasn’t familiar with and I’m a HUGE Pink Floyd fan.
There’s a permanent Grateful Dead station that I’m always hearing ‘new’ stuff on. There’s a permanent Springsteen station that I don’t listen to, but it’s been there for years so people must be happy with it.
I think it must just depend on the programmer.
To go back to Margaritaville, I thought that was one of those stations that wasn’t 24/7 Jimmy, but just music that was all that same kind of vibe. So you’re not going to get Deep Cuts from him you’re going to get some Jimmy and all the rest of the music is going to make you feel like you’re sitting on a beach in a Hawaiian shirt drinking a beer.
Looking at the the website though, if you want deep cuts from him, they have some shows on that station, every day at 8ET (and a few other times throughout the week) they play a full concert and everyday at 11am and 7pm ET they have a show called Buffett Buffet…“It’s an hour of nothing but Jimmy Buffett: live tracks, your requests, rarely heard material, and, of course, his biggest hits”
Quote is failing, but - yes, the Margaritaville channel does play non-JB stuff, but not much of it. As a fan who long predates the irritating Parrothead phenomenon, I’d like to hear a broader mix of his stuff all the time - fine, run a radio hit at least every half-hour to please the people who want to dress up funny and do the Fins dance. But he has at least four or five hundred songs in his catalog worth playing in long rotation, and more from that pile instead of the endless “one more variation of ‘Volcano’” programming would make me re-subscribe. That’s across the board - the entire system seems to run on very short playlists 23 hours a day, with deeper draws confined to special segments or shows. That just seems to be completely contrary to what 250 satellite music channels are all about.
When I was commuting regularly in our car with XM, I loved listening to the comedy channels. But in a matter of a few weeks, I was hearing the same stuff over and over and over. Same deal with 60s on 6 and 70s on 7 - may I just say that “Horse with No Name” does NOT get better with constant repetition.
Is there a reason these stations only play the “hits” and nothing else off the albums? At least with CDs, I get to hear different songs by various artists. Any more, I’m just as happy to keep my radio on NPR and listen to whatever they’re talking about.
What, no Smiths or Morrissey? Lithium used to do one, the other, or both every damned hour. I am never subscribing to Sirius, and I wasn’t too disappointed when I got let go from a job where my boss played Lithium all day.
I’m a huge Billy Joel fan, but because of his Madison Square concerts, they switched the 40s station to Billy Joel radio - all Billy, all the time, with some interviews and background stuff played over and over and over and over and over again.
This started at the beginning of April, and will apparently continue until June 25. Not happy at all - I can get some of the crooner stuff on the Sinatra station, but none of the swing stuff I like so much.
It really sucks, and I love Billy Joel! But it’s just too much…
I haven’t tried it - there’s an additional fee - but supposedly with SiriousXM Internet you can customize your favorite channels, so if you want to hear '80s music with more Duran Duran and less Motley Crue you can do that, I guess.
For me, I like it pretty well - although last year I switched from an XM radio to a Sirius radio and I really miss losing the MLB network and all the games on XM. But on the plus side I can hear any NFL game or almost any college game I would care about.
When I bought my last car (2010), it came with a two-month free trial subscription to SiriusXM.
They should have made it a one-month free trial, because two months were enough to realize how short the playlists on my favorite stations were, and decide I didn’t want to spring for a paid subscription.
My wife has it in her car, so I don’t get to hear it much. I just wanted to remind people that when your subscription is running out, don’t renew at the going rate. Call them up and tell them you’re thinking of cancelling. They will drop that rate way down before losing you.
I just read that in another thread, I renewed a month or two ago so when it comes up again I’m going to look back to see what I paid when I first signed up 7 or 8 years ago. I’m willing to bet it was at least $30 per year cheaper and see if I can get them to drop it to that or even less.
But I really hate their customer service. I’ve even considering mailing in a ::shudder:: check rather than calling them with a credit card to re-up.
I am not a long-term listener, but I do listen when traveling with my friends who have it. I guess I never listened enough to see how small the playlists are.
But, if they have a Grateful Dead channel, can’t they confine it all to that channel, and not pollute the rest of the classic rock channels? 
(Gawd, I hate the Dead.)
While it’s not Sirius/XM, I want to put in a plug for a local radio station here. KCDX. I believe they can be listened to on the internet. They have a truly bottomless deep tracks well. They are a classic rock/college rock kind of format. Basically anything that even loosely fits “rock” from the 60’s on, heavily biased to 60s-70s. Not only do they play songs I’ve never head, they play bands I’ve never heard!
And they have no commercials, and no announcers. They are 100% automated. There are two problems with that-if you are in the car, you don’t know what you have been listening to, (and as obscure as some of the stuff they play is, that can be extremely frustrating) and if something breaks, they can be silent for days until someone fixes it!
There is a station that pretty much fits what you’re describing. It’s called The Spectrum, and it’s by far my favorite channel. It’s not going to play smooth jazz (thank god) but it’s a nice variety of cool stuff from 80s, 90s and today.
That’s what Shazam is for. I even use it on XM if the display is showing the wrong song title.
I just started a thread a couple days ago about whether I should move from Pandora One to SiriusXM because my complaints are the exact same about PO. Same 5 artists no matter how I set up my channel. If I pull it up, it’s the same damn songs I heard two hours ago. It seems to me that either because of licensing costs or extremely bad algorithms they have a playlist of maybe 50 songs.
The Spectrum channel seems to have a headliner or two that get into heavy rotation, but otherwise the variety is good.
I’ve been deliberately trying not to use SXM just as a means to wallow in the music of my youth, and I’ve been listening to the Canadian rock station (Iceberg) lately. It’s a whole alternate universe of music; like Christian rock, except not as angry.
I am a long-term subscriber as I originally had XM installed around June 2004 and am about to hit 10 years. Even if they were right about the economics meaning that only a single company could survive, it’s a shame that the merger happened the way it did. I will not say that everything was peaches with XM pre-merger but I liked the programming more. The Sirius management took over and they were schooled in the FM way of doing things which was not really how XM did it. It has seemed to me ever since that the playlists are generally shallower and some of the things I liked about XM no longer exist. For instance, I don’t remember there ever being a DJ on the XM equivalent of most of the channels (not including actual hosted shows; I just mean general programming) and these days I’m constantly wishing that people would just shut up and get back to music. I don’t care about your stupid story. What I want is a deep automatic jukebox and no breaks.