We went to four programmers from XM and four from Sirius and asked them the same question: With listeners able to choose between things like CD megachangers, digital music servers, DVD music videos, and traditional radio, what does satellite radio have to offer? The programmers showed such passion and dedication in their responses that we decided to publish extended versions of their interviews online.
The XM Crew
The Sirius Crew
The XM Crew
MAXX MYRICK (Real Jazz, Luna): A passion for music — and creativity. Also, you can communicate with us, and we’ll play your favorite song. We’re not just DJs and program directors. The people here reflect the channels they work with. You can’t get that from a CD changer.
LOU BRUTUS (Special X): I don’t care how many CDs you have, there’s never been anything like Special X. It could be the day-to-day stuff that falls under the umbrella of “weirdness,” where you might hear “What’s He Building in There?” from Tom Waits, followed by William Shatner singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” followed by a 28-minute Jack Kerouac piece. Or we could devote three days to the 1,000 worst songs of all time. We’ll take something from every conceivable genre of music, as long as it fits subject-wise. The people at XM are thinking all of this stuff out and putting it together in coherent neighborhoods of sound, for lack of a better term. When radio is done right, I think it’s the most personal medium of them all.
Clockwise from top left, Maxx, Phlash, Tobi, and Lou
S&V: What kind of feedback are you getting?
LOU: I just got an e-mail from a woman who was driving down Route 285 in Colorado when she heard someone saying, “Hi, Cutie! Hi, Cutie!” for 5[1/2] minutes. It was annoying as hell to her, but she had to sit through it to find out what it was. And as it turns out, it was a feature on Special X called “The Fabulous World of Parrot Training Records.” We take a cut at a time off one of these records and give each one a flowery introduction and outro, to make it sound like the Second Coming. So she heard that and pretty much got hooked on the channel. I play stuff by what I call categorically challenged artists. There are so many of these performers who have small, but very loyal fan bases — they’ll never get serviced on traditional radio or on cable TV. But if you put them all together in one pot, it creates a rather odd-sounding bouillabaisse.
TOBI (XMU): Special X and the other niche channels like XMU offer things that don’t have a home anywhere else. People might not actively seek this music out. But once they hear it, they’re like, “That’s so cool. I want to hear more.” That’s what I think is great about XM. There’s something for everybody.
MAXX: Where else can you hear a live concert in the middle of the afternoon? We do it right here, in our studio. We had Kenny Garrett in here last week.
TOBI: Where else can you turn on the radio in the afternoon and hear an awesome indie-rock band like The Dismemberment Plan or Hockey Night playing live? Not everybody’s going to like that, but the people who do are going to be like, “I can’t believe they even know who Hockey Night is.” And that’s what happens on every single channel.
LOU: The Unsigned band channel is 24 hours a day of undiscovered artists. I know a group out of Columbus, Ohio, called Watershed that put out a brilliant album last year, and they sold over 10,000 copies just at gigs and so on. But given the difficult position the recording industry is in, unless you’re selling 5 million copies, you’re going to get lost in the shuffle. Where are bands like Watershed going to go to? Suddenly there’s this thing called XM that can make things happen for them.
TOBI: That happens a lot on my XMU, which is new music. We’re equated with college radio, but I think that sells it short, because we deal with so many different genres of new music, whether it’s underground hip-hop or downtempo or electronica or indie rock. And it’s the same thing because some of these little labels are just a step up from Unsigned. Where on earth are they ever going to get played again — or ever.
I get e-mails all the time from people who say, “You know what, Tobi? I got XM because I thought that I wouldn’t have to buy any new CDs because I was going to be getting all this new music and all of these different channels. But I just went out and spent $50 on new CDs today.” They’re actually buying these albums they hear. Everybody is so busy, so we filter all of the new music for them. We can say, “Hey, here’s this great new band out of Minneapolis” to somebody in, say, Modesto, California, who would never have heard about Hockey Night. And then they can go out and buy the CD.
MAXX: This is radio the way it used to be. It’s all about the music.
PHLASH PHELPS (The 60s): I do the 60s channel, so let me explain a little bit about how the decades channels work. We don’t use the word “oldies” here; we use the word “decades” because “old” has such a bad connotation. The FM oldies stations are dropping all those 50s songs, and now they’re starting to drop some of the 60s stuff. As the Boomer generation grows older, they’re worrying about commercials. But we don’t have to worry about that.
A year ago, we put together a thing called “Eight Days in May” where I took every hit from the beginning of 1960, which was “El Paso” by Marty Robbins, and went all the way to “Long and Winding Road.” I played them chronologically for eight days, nonstop, without commercials. And when we were done, we repeated them, but this time based on how they ranked in the charts. Who else could have done that? It worked so well, we came up with a new thing we call “It” — as in, this is “It.” We start in the 40s — 1935, actually — and our 40s channel will play everything up to 1950 in chronological order. Then our 50s channel takes over and plays every song they have. Then we do it for four straight days, and then onto the 70s, 80s, and 90s — it takes almost a month to play every song. And we took it up to 2002. It was such a big hit.
LOU: You needn’t have grown up in a particular time to appreciate the style of music from that era, or the actual music from that era. People in their 20s write to me about guys that I play — like Raymond Scott. His stuff’s timeless. I mean, Scott not only was a big influence on Carl Stalling and his music for the Warner Bros. cartoons, but he also influenced Andy Partridge from XTC and Frank Zappa. People like the Beau Hunks are still performing Scott’s music live.
TOBI: Just because XMU is supposed to be like a college station, you don’t have to be in college to like new music. We don’t have to pigeonhole, but everything seems to be pigeonholed on regular radio. It’s like, “We have to target this demographic, or that one.” But good music is good music. If I’m 80 years old and I want to listen to Lemonjelly because it sounds good, I’m going to listen to it.
MAXX: Where do established artists go to get their music played? They can’t get it played on traditional radio anymore. If you’re over 40 years old, traditional radio won’t play it. But I’m 45, and I still want to hear those artists. If they’ve got new music, why can’t I hear it? You can hear it here at XM.
TOBI: New Order and the Pet Shop Boys came out with new albums last year, and we played them. Those are pioneers from when alternative radio was still alternative, but they’re never going to get played anywhere. And both of their albums are awesome.
MAXX: People are forever proclaiming jazz dead, but I have about 3,000 brand-new records sitting on my desk. And we’re playing all of these new artists. Peter Cincotti — new kid on the scene. Who’s going to play his music? I mean, if jazz is dead, these guys are —
LOU: Yeah, somebody’d better phone these guys and let them know.
MAXX: Jazz at one time was the popular music in the culture, just like hip-hop is today. But after the 60s, it went to public radio, where it turned into a kind of elitist music. But we don’t pontificate here — we just rock it.
TOBI: The other good thing about XM is that if you write into the programming department and give your suggestions, they take them into consideration. Channels have been reorganized and actually created based on listeners’ suggestions. And you always get personal responses, which is kind of amazing.
LOU: This is a living, breathing thing, XM is. A lot of the multiday features and some of the featurettes on Special X started because some guy wrote, “Hey, did you ever think about doing this?” And I’ll say, “Good idea,” and go into our database — which has literally millions of songs in it — and punch up, say, songs about dogs and see what we get. Wow! 12,000 songs! Then you have to go through them all and find the stuff you want to put in.
MAXX: Our Dixieland program is the result of listener demand.
TOBI: When people write in with a negative reaction to something on XMU, like underground hip-hop, it’s not like they’re so pissed off that they’re never going to listen again. We explain that we do it because it’s as much a part of new music culture as anything else. With eight different genres of new music, you’re not going to like every single song in every different genre. Some people say, “Well, I don’t have a lot of time to scan the dial, so maybe I’ll just go listen to something else when you’re playing stuff I don’t like.”
LOU: Then again, scanning the dial on XM, it could take them a month and a half to get back to you.
PHLASH: A lot of people say, “You guys aren’t local.” Well, if you listen to one hour of my CQ show at 9 a.m. Eastern, you’ll hear that people call from all over the country. And wherever they call from, I will talk to them about where they’re from, because I’ve gone through 17 radio stations to get here. By the age of 29, I had been to all 50 states. People will call me and say, “How in the world do you know where I am? Are you, like, tracking me with those satellites?”
S&V: How much freedom do you have to program?
LOU: Total and utter creative freedom. No one ever says yes or no to anything. With Special X, they said, “What if we just gave you this channel, and let you do basically whatever you want with it?” I was like, “Is this a prank?”
MAXX: The level of the talent and creativity in this place is just mindboggling. And it’s all working together. We’ve all worked in markets where we were working against a competitor. Now we have a hundred and one radio stations, and we have access to all that brainpower, all that creativity — for one purpose: for XM. That’s an incredible resource.
PHLASH: The liveness is what really brings out a lot of the channels. When you’re live, and you’re in touch with your audience and they can call and talk to you — that’s what really touches the heart. People are like, “My gosh, I actually got my request on.”
TOBI: And it’s not like we’re just robots here. You listen to terrestrial radio now, and they’re just reading lineup cards, and they’re also voice-tracking 14 other stations. That’s all well and good for what they do, but that all becomes generic. I think it’s time for a change. Just to see that the Hives and the Vines and all these underground garage-rock-type bands are now getting played on MTV — it’s obvious that people want something more than Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. I think our biggest obstacle now is just getting people to understand what we do. And once they hear it, they’re in love with it.
Photo by Michelle HoodThe Sirius Crew
MEG GRIFFIN (Organic, Folktown): Something’s missing when you depend on CD changers, no matter how vast your library is. Because we’re based in New York City, everybody who is anybody, plus people you’ve never heard of before, comes through our studios when they’re in town. We’ve got probably from five to ten interviews going every day. And every day at 5 o’clock on Channel 100 we do this thing called Sirius Sessions, which is like an hour-long live mini concert. When you’re talking with an artist who’s just sitting there with a guitar playing what is essentially an unplugged version of his new album, it’s different from what you’re going to get on any record. You’re getting information direct from the artists you like about things that have gone on in their lives that you might otherwise not be privy to. You can’t get stuff like that from a changer. Changers don’t have what’s been torn out of radio for me — the human element. And we definitely do.
Clockwise from left: Jerry, Lenny, José, and Meg.
JERRY RUBINO (Alt Nation, Left of Center): When I got hired, the first thing said to me was, “I’ve had calls from programmers left and right wanting to work here. But I don’t want programmers. I want music people like yourself.” If you wanted to put on a band because they’re big in England, a regular program director in America would say, “We’ll put them on the specialty show — give them a couple of minutes on a Sunday night.” But I want them to play live, I want them to guest DJ. These are the bands the listeners are going out to see. P J Harvey or Bjork can sell 7,000 tickets for a show, but they don’t get played on the radio. They’ve got a fan base, people who want to know more about them than just how to find their CDs. And we’re there early with releases — “Alright, here’s a brand-new record from Stereophonics, here’s a brand-new record from the Dandy Warhols.” Chances are they’re going to hear those records on Alt Nation before anywhere else. I’ll do whatever it takes to get a new release from the label, or overseas, or whatever it is, and get it on the air — just to make radio exciting again, to make people want to know, “What did I miss that happened on Sirius a half hour ago?” When you listen to terrestrial radio for a half hour, you know what’s going to happen for the rest of the day — nothing exciting’s going on.
MEG: You’re spoken to like an idiot. Another huge difference is, I am my audience. Jerry is his audience. José is his audience. We are the culture our audience is in. You’re not listening to somebody who presents the music badly, is ill-informed, and doesn’t care — someone who doesn’t even go to the shows. With most kinds of radio, you’re listening to people who’ve been hired because they’re robots and announcers. But you sometimes just don’t know what’s going to happen next here. When I had Shelby Lynne in the other day, she gave me 12 new songs she’s written and produced. She said, “Here, you’re the first to have them.”
JOSÉ MANGIN (Hard Attack, Planet Rhyme): You’ve got to buy CDs to put in a changer. You’ve got to download a file to put on your little memory chips and sticks and everything like that. But with Sirius, you just turn it on and leave it on and enjoy it. You hang out and you listen to DJs who are really talking about current stuff and who really do their research. Our DJs on Hard Attack, which is the metal channel, live and breathe the music. They go to shows. I mean, I’m going to be a dad, and I’ve got cuts and bruises and blood from being in the mosh pit on Monday night with my friend’s band. We just go out there and represent our music, and we bring that to the people in a really cool, strong, hard-core, passionate way. And we don’t just focus on, “Oh, there’s a show tonight in Jersey.” I mean, that’s cool and Jersey’s cool, but because we’re a national service we can talk about shows in Arizona, too.
JERRY: When we get excited about a record, it goes right on the air. It doesn’t have to be approved by a consultant or anybody else.
JOSÉ: And people aren’t paying us to play it.
JERRY: I’m not knocking the whole iPod, MP3 thing. It’s going to exist. But the people who use that as a key source for getting new music are still missing a hell of a lot. An example I always use is XTC, who have been around since the late 70s. They put out two albums between 1999 and 2000, and out of their fan base of roughly 750,000, I guarantee you 600,000 didn’t even know those albums existed because there was no outlet for them to be played. Yet they got played here because XTC is a core heritage band.
MEG: One of the funniest things I remember seeing here was Nancy Sinatra walking down the hall one way and Bryan Adams walking down the hall the other, and both of them flipping out at seeing each other. And there’s nothing that stops you from going into a studio with those two people and recording something that would never happen in any other recording studio again. That’s just another part of the direct-from-the-artist stuff a music lover gets here that you don’t get out of downloading a bunch of songs into a player.
JOSÉ: I was with Grandmaster Flash in the corner studio overlooking Times Square and George Clinton walks by. Flash is like, “Oh my God!” And then George comes into the studio and they start talking, and we’re recording all this, and they start freestyle rapping together. I just got goosebumps. Slayer and Tony Bennett running into each other — that was pretty cool. Now, what if Megadeth met Pat Sajak? That would be cool.
MEG: Another reason why we can gather so much of this kind of stuff, bring it to people on the air, and play it many times in case they missed it the first time is because we have 60 music streams. So it’s not limited to who might come by one radio station and visit that day.
JERRY: We can give you tour information all across the country as soon as we find out about it. I used to get excited hearing, “Two o’clock today on WNEW, big major announcement about Led Zeppelin coming to New York City.” The school would go crazy. And that’s what we’ve got to bring back, whether the band’s going to be in New York City or in Topeka, Kansas. If Ash, who are major artists on Alt Nation, is doing a tour, if they’re going to Topeka, we’re going to get the people there excited that they’re going to be playing there.
JOSÉ: And our database size, too. Normally, a rock radio station will have 200 active cuts — whatever’s their gold, and some new stuff because they’re being paid to play it. But our Hard Attack database of active cuts is, like, 1,500 strong —
JERRY: — and growing.
JOSÉ: And we go the whole gamut of metal, because the kids who know Slipknot don’t know anything about the history of metal. So that’s when we’ll come in and play some Black Sabbath or some Exciter or old Venom or old Slayer.
MEG: The other impression people are getting from traditional radio is that everything is disposable, so once a track or band has seen its heyday, it’s forgotten about. Well, the fan didn’t forget, and Sirius doesn’t forget, either.
JERRY: Left of Center, our college-indie channel, helps that listener out there who’s looking for something new by providing a pretty wide variety of indie music, 24 hours, seven days a week. Any college radio station, once a record is eight weeks old, it goes into a library and either never gets heard again or gets stolen or thrown out. Here, we present the history and heritage of this whole independent college-radio scene.
S&V: The personality was squeezed out of mainstream radio primarily for corporate reasons. But why did the audience acquiesce? Why do you think people didn’t clamor more, didn’t rebel more?
MEG: I think the average listener didn’t feel he had any power or control over that and basically watched the whole world becoming slowly run by corporations and figured radio was being run that way, too. And their reaction, instead of rebelling, was to buy more CDs and walk around with Walkmans.
JOEL SALKOWITZ (VP, Music Content and Programming): There’s certainly an awareness, at least at Top 40 radio and contemporary radio, that kids are not going there for their music anymore. It’s no longer the nexus of their musical world like it was when we were growing up. They’re buying their own CDs, they’re swapping CDs, or they’re swapping files on the Internet. But they’re also starting to look to alternatives like we provide here. If you look at the Arbitron numbers, you’ll see there’s been a slow but steady decline in radio listenership over the last ten years. And it’s been about that long since the consolidation started in the radio business.
JERRY: Radiohead is probably the biggest band in the alternative world right now. They can sell out Madison Square Garden, but anywhere in America, you’ll be lucky to hear anything other than “Creep” more than a handful of times a week. But they’re guaranteed five to seven tracks off from every album on Alt Nation, because they’re a core band and that’s what the audience wants.
MEG: The same is true on Folktown. Joni Mitchell is kind of a household name, right? But about the only thing you’ll hear from her on traditional radio is “Big Yellow Taxi.” Even someone like Bob Dylan can’t get played on traditional broadcast radio — it’s unbelievable what people think doesn’t matter anymore. And we know directly from listeners that they beg to differ. And they can’t get the depth we offer here anywhere else. People say, “Why should I have to pay for radio? I never had to before?” And the first answer is obvious: You get so much more music. But there’s another answer: Is it really free when you have to endure at least 15 minutes of commercials every hour? You’re being barraged.
JOEL: And that’s before you factor in spots like “This hour of music was brought to you buy so-and-so” for 10 seconds, and before you tag on the two to four sponsors that are promoting the station’s concert, and so on. The fact that the music channels here are all commercial-free is a tremendous advantage. Arbitron and Edison did a bunch of studies looking at people’s issues with radio, and for 83 or 85% of the people, too many commercials was their biggest complaint.
MEG: Ads are offensive and invasive. And they determine the programming. They’re one of the things that have contributed to the ruination of a lot of country radio. The ads are so focused because they’re trying to sell to that woman they think is in charge of deciding what gets bought in this household. And an artist might have a record he’s worked really long and hard on, but whether it gets played or not will be based on things that have absolutely nothing to do with music, or art, or the audience.
JOEL: We don’t have to walk into an advertiser and say, “We have this rock channel. And it has this many 18 to 34 year olds.” All we’re trying to say is, “We want you to get enough satisfaction out of what you hear to subscribe to us.” If there’s a bunch of 14 year olds who all of a sudden figure out that Jimi Hendrix or the Doors are really cool and want to listen to nothing but classic rock, that’s fine by us. From our end of it, that’s just another group of people that likes the service.
JOSÉ: I get e-mails every day from people all across the country saying, “I can’t believe you guys are playing that.” Or, “I’ve never heard this.” Or, “I’m getting so turned on by this band. I went out and bought their CD.” Or, “They’re coming to my town in a few weeks. Thanks for introducing me to this band.”
JERRY: I sent out an e-mail recently from a listener in New Orleans who wrote, “I got Sirius four months ago, and since then I’ve gone out and bought Pete Yorn, Doves, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Elbow, this and that,” and he listed 15 artists. And every one of them is an artist who doesn’t get played on terrestrial radio.
MEG: The e-mails I’m getting are coming from people who are happy with what they’re hearing here. And then they say, “Do you think?” — and they’ll name some things they haven’t heard yet or something new they’re waiting for. But the tone is different from the mail I got at other radio stations. You can tell by the way they’re saying, “How ’bout?” whatever it is they’re suggesting or requesting that they actually think it’s possible, that you’re going to read this and act on it. I perceive trust, and I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve felt that people trusted the person in my position on the radio. And it broke my heart because I never really did anything to lose that trust. But I watched it all melt around me in this business. We don’t insult the audience, you know. Conventional radio insults me. [laughter]