Others annoyed at XM's move to mass appeal...

[acroyear]

XM's Mainstream Makeover - Motley Fool - MSNBC.com:

Anyway, here's the big problem with this move: XM already has equivalents to a lot of these new channels, and they're going to be playing popular mainstream music that you can already pick up on any terrestrial-radio station. XM is also busy stressing that it will still have the most commercial-free music stations on satellite radio. Sure, the lack of ads is nice, but the big selling point for satellite radio has been the variety it offers. Yet a good chunk of this new channel lineup suggests a move toward homogenization and mass appeal, which is one of the things that makes terrestrial radio so dull. And what's the point of continuing to boast about more ad-free music channels than competitor Sirius Satellite Radio(Nasdaq: SIRI) if the new channels don't give you anything you can't already hear for free?

XM has been quick to point out that fans of these exiled channels can find a lot of the music they like on other stations, and that some of the shows on these stations are migrating elsewhere on the XM dial. But that's not the point. The beauty of niche channels is that they're not watered down with other stuff you don't want to hear.

Comments

[thatwasjen]

As a Sirius partisan, I'm having a schadenfreude moment...

[katrinb.livejournal.com]

Heck, I'm still annoyed over Special X getting canned.
Fine Tuning isn't one of the ones they're dumping, is it? I like a station that goes straight from Peter Gabriel to Dvorak to the Afro-Celt Sound System...