Woot XM alert

I never understood pay radio. Gotta be the stupidest thing on the planet. Does not even compare to listening to my Mp3 player in the car.

Put it this way. Let's imagine a world where all radio programming cost money, otherwise you don't get it. And let's say someone creates this system where you can listen to radio for free. All you have to do is put up with some commercials once in a while. Which one would you choose?

Cable TV is different. Free TV is dumbed down for the masses with very few movies.

 

Me neither, now that I can hook up my mp3 player to my car radio. I'll take that over satellite any day ...

in my limited experience, I didn't find pay radio to be much better than regular radio ... just more channels to search for something I wanted to hear and no Tivo to record something good that might be coming on a channel I just skipped over ...

 

And let's imagine that all of the music stations on that free radio are absolutely fucking awful and play 15 minutes of commercials every hour. Oh, and your reception won't be any good, and if you drive into a rural area all you get is Jesus or mariachi music.

I'll pay gladly, thanks.

 

Write-brained, you're good people, but you need to put down the crackpipe.

Free TV dumbed down for the masses? It wasn't the over-the-air network crowd that brought us Paris' trainwreck life, including tonight's Larry King schlock.

Terrestrial radio definitely has taken a dumbed-down approach. Luckily I live in a market where we have a station that takes some chances on music. I moved here from a BFE outpost that didn't even have its own modern rock station, and it was a pain to haul one in from 40 miles away -- a station that fed a steady diet of craptastic metal nearly 24/7.

Just like cable can have Skinomax and the classic movies channel, XM can have its own NPR-style network and meathead shock jocks. That being said, if I were gonna get any satellite provider, it'd be Sirius, solely for Stern.

(And PC, satellite reception in rural areas ain't great shakes, either, though there's more of a chance you'll find non-crap on the radio than if you simply listened to the three stations in Hillbilly, USA.)

 

I think Sirius has a device where you can do just that, then load it into your iPod.

 

One word, Wicked. TiVo. If not for TiVo I wouldn't watch any fucking TV. Until radio can give me exactly what I want when I want it, I ain't paying for it.

 

Still much easier just to download from my computer. Stern's not worth the hassle.

 

Sirius also has the NFL and NASCAR. XM has MLB. There are plenty of times I might wanna listen to the game on the way home from the office, even if it's through one of those devices on a delay.

 

What Wicked said.

Unless your mp3 player has the BBC World Service, Instant Traffic & Weather* and every MLB game.

* - I find our local all-news terrestrial station to be more up-to-date and better quality, giving me the sole reason for any free radio whatsoever.

 

Do you like sports? Then you'd like pay radio. You can get MLB, NHL, PGA, Indy Car and an assortment of college sports on XM. Sirius has the NFL, NBA, NASCAR, Wimbledon and the NCAA basketball tourney.

Do you like the spontaneity (man I butchered that) of radio? Yeah, it'd be great to hear Night Ranger if I had my iPod hooked up in my car (if I had an iPod, that is). But it wouldn't surprise me, because I'd have like nine Night Ranger albums at my disposal there.

I can understand not wanting to scan the dial on terrestrial radio, when you've got two stations you can stomach and the odds of hearing something good in between the commercials are 100:1. But with XM, I like the fun of scanning the dial, KNOWING I'll find something good and the excitement of finding an old favorite song or an old favorite band just randomly playing, as opposed to knowing I'll eventually hear it on my iPod. I also like being able to pick up any damn baseball game I want at any time of the night.

Satellite radio is the single greatest thing ever.

 

I can see the sports stuff, though I'd save my money and spend it on the Directv NFL package instead of radio ... now that's fucking awesome ... I wouldn't pay to hear baseball on the radio and wouldn't listen to Nascar even if it was free.

 

Well at least we agree on something.