Thursday, January 18, 2007

XM and Sirius CAN'T Merge

That's the implied word from FCC chairman Kevin Martin, who wastes his time censoring primetime TV shows because of complaints from a tiny but angry group of activists and who looks the other way when payola is rampant in radio. Meanwhile, satellite radio has tons of competitors from regular radio to digital radio to cable radio and is having trouble surviving with two duplicate services, but Martin would rather see both fail than a combined version succeed.

1 comment:

Danny King said...

Are people complaining about Sirius and XM doing all this advertising about commercial free stations, when in fact 90% of the stations on Sirius contain commercials. I contacted Sirius regarding this and their reply (enclosed in part) was that they don’t consider it to be commercials. Where I come from if it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck…… In their reply Sirius boasts that they have all of 12 stations with no host or ”announcements”. How is it that Sirius can advertise 100 stations with no commercials? Please cover this.

Thank You.

(part of the Sirius babble)

Our emphasis is on the music and entertainment you want. Master music programmers and on-air personalities, who are true experts, host our music. They back up the music with compelling information about the song being played. We do not consider announcements and on-air host discussions ”commercials", we simply want to ensure that our listeners remember who they are listening to so they can come back to their favorite channels and make requests. We apologize for any frustration caused by the announcements and on-air host discussions.

Though many of our subscribers appreciate the on-air hosts on SIRIUS, we do understand that there are subscribers who would rather hear music without DJs. Danny, we\’re happy to point out that we have 12 un-hosted music channels and encourage you to check them out! They are as follows:

Starlite // Ch. 2
SIRIUS Love // Ch. 3
Movin\’ Easy // Ch. 4
The Bridge // Ch. 10
The Coffeehouse // Ch. 30
Chill // Ch. 35
Planet Jazz // Ch. 70
Spa73 // Ch. 73
Kids Stuff // Ch. 116