In response to my post about Sirius Radio, Jon Chan asks “why did you pick sirius over xm?”. I was going to post a reply as a comment, but it got a bit long so I decided to post it here.
The choice was easy :).
Firstly, if I’m going to be paying for radio, the last thing I want is commercials interrupting my music. (XM has commercials while Sirius’ music channels are commercial-free)
Secondly, and most importantly, Clear Channel is a major investor in XM radio — and I want nothing to do with Clear Channel. In case you're not familiar with them, Clear Channel owns nearly 1,200 stations nationwide and they’ve virtually single-handedly responsible for ruining commercial radio.
In DFW alone, Clear Channel owns several stations. 92.5, 97.1, 102.1, 102.9 — all Clear Channel. Worst of all, Clear Channel supports pay-for-play where record companies simply bribe stations to play their songs. That’s one of the reasons why Britney Spears gets her songs plastered all over the airwaves but yet yourFavoriteLocalBand never gets heard.
Clear Channel is evil, and the less money I can send in their direction, the better.
Something else to read: One Station Under God
i just remember reading a short time back on how sirius has only a fraction of subscribers that xm has. granted that both companies are still in the red, it would suck to see sirius close up, and that would be one expensive defuct receiver.
AM is good enough for me. (Curtis & Kuby)
With their 30-minute commercial free non-stop-talk-block during my drive to work, who could ask for more?
http://www.wabcradio.com/showdj.asp?t=p&DJID=1726
You may hate Clear Channel — you even called them “evil” — but making that the deciding factor in choosing Sirius doesn’t make sense, IMHO.
Clear Channel had a major investment in XM, but it has dwindled to about 2%. With the way it’s going, CC won’t even have a representative on XM’s board of directors soon (they need to have a minimum 5% ownership to stay on the board). CC’s actual amount of influence at XM is small; they do program some stations on XM (including two pop music channels and two or three talk stations), but that isn’t unique; other companies program other stations at XM as well. Except for those stations, XM’s channels hardly sound like a CC station. You might as well boycott them for also taking programming from Disney (Radio Disney and ABC News & Talk) or Murdoch (Fox News and Fox Sports), but then you’d probably be boycotting Sirius as well, since they carry all those stations but Fox Sports.
There are other reasons to prefer XM over Sirius:
-Both services will give you wider and deeper music programming than on commercial radio, but XM’s is more diverse, with 70 channels compared to Sirius’ 60. XM has a hellava lotta music across its music stations that you’ll never hear on a CC station, including a station for unsigned artists that you might never hear otherwise.
-XM’s $10 a month costs more than 25% less than Sirius’ monthly price of $13 (which also makes Sirius about 30% more expensive than XM). And for that…
-Starting Feb. 1, XM will have commercial-free music. (Currently there’s only about 3-4 minutes of commercials during peak listening hours on about half the music stations, with none or virtually none at night. Most of the stations I listen to have no commercials.) Unfortunately, XM will also loose two music channels on that day, but they’ll gain two news/talk stations, including MSNBC, for a 68/32 music/talk station ratio. IMHO, XM already has better music programming; combine no commercials on the music channels with the lower price, and XM will clearly have a better music value.
-Both services have CNN Headline News, but only XM has the original CNN for the car.
-In March, XM will start rolling out local traffic/weather stations for major markets. They probably won’t be as the local traffic/weather reports on AM, but they’ll be more frequent, XM says they’ll have fewer commercials.
And since you brought up “evil” corporations, how about Ford? They’re a major investor in Sirius; did they ever pay reparations to the slave laborers that worked under its German division during the Nazi era? (I’m not seriously suggesting people boycott Ford, Sirius, XM, or even CC — you can only take these things so far. If you’re going to boycott everything CC has a stake in, you’re going to boycott a lot of companies and avoid looking at many billboards.)
In Sirius’ defense, they do have NPR and PRI, as well as the NFL, NBA and NHL. But the sound quality for talk stations on Sirius is worse; sports programming works better on TV, and out-of-town games are also frequently available on cable or satellie TV; and if you want to listen to public radio, you can get a tax deduction for supporting a local station instead of giving $3 a month extra to Sirius.
Oops — I wrote:
“In March, XM will start rolling out local traffic/weather stations…”
That should have read:
“In March, XM will start rolling out local traffic/weather stations for major markets. They probably won’t be as good as the local traffic/weather reports on AM, but they’ll be more frequent, and XM says they’ll have fewer commercials.”
Given how few actual paid commercials they have on XM (they mostly play features and public service ads during the commercial breaks on their news/talk stations), I’m inclined to believe this.
I was looking for material about the corporate behemoth Clear Channel, and by coincidence I came across what you wrote four years to the day after you had written it. I try to listen as little as possible to the six Clear Channel stations in our area–they feature cloying soccer mom ballads, insipid rock acts such as Nickelback, and the obnoxious Fox Sports.
Pay close attention to the news and prepare your arguments with up to date information.
Clear Channel ‘not only’ rakes in earnings in radio, online streaming, on-demand programming, billboards, taxi tops, mall advertising posters, live nation concerts, and interest a multitude of other marketing media around the world…
They DO kinda know what they’re doing. Maybe, and I may be making a teensy assumption, but is it possible that that’s why they’re so huge. Jealous?
Oh, their investments are changing as of last week too. OOPS! Did you miss that? Curious? Read some up to date market information before you start poo-pooing the success of this wonderfully successful company that helps push the envelope.
Yes, they do know what they are doing. They are maximizing revenue, and doing a good job of it. They are doing so at the expense of quality radio. I don’t have a problem with corporations making money, but I do have a problem with the FCC standing by and letting them eliminate choice on the airwaves.
As for the other investments CC makes, this isn’t about that.