Satellite radio sees subscriber growth

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There are uses for it

---If it's pay it's useless---

I disagree. I think it's tremendously useful, if done right. Commercial radio is generally useless to me. The homogenization of content and ownership has made it unlistenable. I don't want to hear the same 10 Britney Spears or Eminem songs over and over again. Due to limited spectrum, FM and AM are only going to be able to have a limited number of stations in a given area.

Satellite gets around this by having virtually unlimited bandwidth. You can have as many stations as you want. This means that instead of having to appeal broadly to everybody (which results in appealing to nobody), you can narrowcast and have specific stations for specific tastes. Want to have an all Tom Waits station 24 hours a day? It's commercial suicide on FM, but on satellite, it's a piece of cake, and there are people like me who would happily listen to it.

Also of note--did you know that there are no (zero) country music stations in the New York City area? Satellite provides an alternative for fans of music who have been shut out by the ClearChannel and Infinity conglomerates.

I also like the idea of being able to drive across the entire country while listening to the same radio station/s.

So it has potential. Right now, I think the offerings are still too limited (only 200 or so channels on XM). The point is to make money off the "long tail", a retail phenomenon described here, one that is just as, if not more profitable than making money off the top hits:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=1&topic=tail&topic_set=

Posted by: tic swayback   Posted on: 12/29/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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