So, the XM and Sirius satellite radio station merger went into play this week. I only happened to catch wind of it because of a leaked new program guide that I saw on some RSS feed. Unlike most, I wasn’t really affected.
I have 12 total presets on my car, split between two bands. The first six are just rock stations that don’t happen to suck. The second set is pretty empty. The only presets I care about are my New Age radio station and my Old Time Radio one.
As far as I can tell, the music selection has improved greatly for the rock stations, but the names of all the channels are a lot dumber now.
“Audio Visions” was the name of the New Age channel, and now it’s called “Spa” instead. What the crap? The two terms aren’t even closely related. The rock ones are okay, though I kinda liked the name “Flight 26”. Ah well.
I realize I’m a bit of a weirdo posting an entry about how the names of my radio stations changed, but I’m a real junky for metadata and tags, not to mention naming schemes, so I take a minor interest in the stuff.
I’ll still probably cancel my subscription this year. I’ve been threatening to do that for about two years now, and honestly it’s hard to beat when I’m only paying about $89 a *year*. My subscription is up in about a month, though, and I’ll have to keep an eye on the rock stations. Right before the merger, things had gone atrociously bad, where the playlists were really short, and it was seriously the same thing as terrestrial radio (let’s play the top 50 music songs *all the time* and nothing else!) minus the annoying car dealership ads. When you see the same band playing on three of my six presets *at the same time*, you know something’s going on. That’s honestly happened more than once the past couple of months.
Ah well, uncustomed radio is a lost cause anyway waiting to die. I’m just biding my time til I can get something like LastFM in my car. There’s so much music out there to listen to, I’d love to hear nothing but new stuff and suited to my tastes. I’d definately pay for that.