When I brought my car a few years ago, it came with satellite radio. At the time there were two companies that provided the service: XM and Sirius. Market conditions eventually forced the two competitors to merge in order to survive, resulting in the mess called Sirius-XM Radio.
Satellite radio offers many advantages over standard commercial radio (or at least it used to before the merger). The biggest advantage is that the channels are very, very specific with few or no commercials. For example, if you want only Grateful Dead music, there is a channel for that. If you want only music from the 1960s or want to listen to movie soundtracks, there is a channel for that. In fact, there are 240 channels and that is the problem.
On Wednesday, May 4, Sirius-XM Radio will re-organize its channel guide. And on that date, hundreds of thousands of satellite radio listeners will go crazy trying to find their favorite radio station. For example, the Grateful Dead channel will move from channel 57 to 23. My favorite station, Radio Classics, will move from channel 164 to 82. And how did Sirius-XM Radio notify its listeners of this upcoming channel change? They sent out an email referring users to their website to find the new channel lineup. They also announced the change on their stations once an hour. So assuming you are listening to the radio when the announcement is made or have an email account, you were notified of change.
But what about those who have the service, but don’t have a computer or aren’t in their cars when the announcements are made. Well, for them, Wednesday will be hell because there was no regular (snail) mail notification of the change. But then this type of inconsideration has been typical of Sirius-XM since the merger. I’ll find my channels on Wednesday, but there will be many, too many, who will find Wednesday extremely frustrating. Way to go Sirius-XM Radio!