Pretty much all you need to know about satellite radio can be summed up in one paragraph. There are two services, Sirius and XM. XM offers 101 channels, with 71 of them devoted to music, and the rest to news and talk. Sirius has 100 channels (or “streams,” as it calls them), 60 of them music-only. Sirius’s music channels are commercial-free while about half of XM’s carry some ads. XM is $9.95 a month; Sirius is $12.95 a month. You’ll find satellite radio in a growing number of new cars — Sirius is aligned primarily with Ford, while XM has GM in its camp — but you can also have it installed in your current car. Sony is a major supplier for XM and Kenwood for Sirius. Home gear is becoming available for both services.
But all of that is secondary because if you’re going to pay for radio, it had better give you a pretty good reason not to pop a CD in the player or switch to AM and FM. Since the value of both services really rests with their programming, we arranged for three of our veteran music critics — Billy Altman, Brett Milano, and Richard C. Walls — to live with both Sirius and XM receivers for a month. The mandate wasn’t necessarily for them to declare which channels were their runaway favorites, but to discover which offered the most intriguing and promising programming. Given that all three writers have eclectic tastes, we knew they would sample widely and wisely. Here, as they used to say on Dragnet, are the results of that trial.
It’s not just the music that makes satellite radio more fun than its broadcast counterpart — it’s the announcers. Browsing the dial at XM or Sirius, you’re transported back to the days when every station had a different style and personality, before all those idiosyncratic DJs were replaced by computer voices and sound-alike morning teams. On XM’s ’50s channel, for instance, a manic DJ announces a “Nuuumber Oooonne!” with the proper flourish. And on its Unsigned channel, the Smithereens’ genial frontman, Pat DiNizio, hosts a daily show of his favorite demos. Sirius’s ’60s channel serves up hits with authentic-sounding radio jingles. You hear Southern accents on both services’ country channels, hipster jive on the blues stations, and echoed voices over sexy keyboard beds on the soul channels.
Satellite radio takes on the mission that commercial radio abandoned more than a decade ago — to satisfy the hunger for a wide variety of music, commercial and otherwise. When you browse the display dial on XM and watch the artists’ names roll by — everyone from Amon Duul II to Slobberbone to Tommy Newsom — you know you’ve stumbled into a music nut’s heaven.
XM is the more eclectic of the two services. The segues can be downright bizarre, and that’s a plus. On its ’60s channel, the Beatles go right into Engelbert Humperdinck — which, strange as that sounds, is exactly how it happened back in the day. On Bluesville, a vintage Guitar Slim track might be followed by one from the new Allman Brothers Band album. The Unsigned channel sent me running to the Internet for more info on Katie Todd, who blended wry Liz Phair-type vocals with kitchen-sink instrumentation.
The real payoff is hearing something to bring out that “Oh, wow — can’t believe I’m hearing this” reaction. XM’s Music Lab segued from Rick Wakeman’s new, import-only album Out There into a 30-year-old Strawbs number that Wakeman played on. Over on the ’70s channel, I heard Hurricane Smith’s “Oh Babe, What Would You Say” — maybe the worst song to hit the charts during the entire decade, but how many commercial stations would dare unearth it?
Sirius lacks the unbridled music geekery found at XM. Too many channels — like Big Rock, Octane (metal), the Pulse (Adult Contemporary), Alt Nation, and Hot Jamz — just play the same top hits, commercial alternative, and Classic Rock you can hear anywhere. Sirius’s “deeper” Classic Rock channel, The Vault, features tracks only slightly less obvious than those on its regular heritage-rock channel. (XM’s Deep Tracks channel isn’t quite deep enough either.) I also caught a few programming gaffes on Sirius. For instance, its ’60s channel played Sugarloaf’s “Green Eyed Lady,” which is actually from 1970, and the ’50s channel played the Essex’s “Easier Said Than Done,” which wasn’t a hit until 1963.
If dance or hip-hop is your genre, Sirius has the edge, offering five hip-hop channels to XM’s two and six dance channels (featuring everything from ’70s disco to modern electronica) to XM’s four. And Sirius devotes a channel to jam bands — one of the few major genres XM missed. Jam Central covers all the right bases, from Widespread Panic to George Clinton.
Still, my two favorite channels were both on XM. X Country had the most consistent mixes I heard anywhere, blending alt-country’s big names (Lyle Lovett, Ryan Adams) with cult heroes (James Intveld, Amy Rigby) and worthy if less trendy choices, like post-reunion Lynyrd Skynyrd. XM’s hidden gem is On the Rocks, which plays continuous bachelor-pad music. I thrilled to the space-age sounds of Alvino Rey and Ferrante & Teicher, and even the obvious choices held some surprises. When they played Frank Sinatra’s “I Get a Kick out of You,” it was the original version with the rarely sung line, “Some, they may go for cocaine.” Even the Chairman of the Board can’t go for that on commercial radio today.
— Brett Milano
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| Both Sirius and XM offer a steady flow of live programming throughout the day, from interviews with solo performances to full-blown band concerts. XM has recently featured live appearances by Wynton Marsalis, Ben Folds, Tony Bennett, Pete Yorn, and Willie Nelson, while Sirius has played host to Peter Gabriel, Shelby Lynne, Rob Zombie, Rosanne Cash, and the Allman Brothers Band, among others. Above left, Sheepy and Colin McIntyre of the Mull Historical Society at Sirius; right, Sister Hazel at XM. Photos by Michelle Hood |
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All That Jazz
The first thing I want to know about any alternative to commercial radio is how it handles jazz. These are hard times for anyone who wants to hear acoustic mainstream jazz on the radio. Even a large market like Detroit, where I live, doesn’t have a genuine jazz station — just one of those “smooth” pretenders.
Both satellite-radio services acknowledge this situation by the titles they’ve chosen for their straight-ahead jazz channels — Pure Jazz on Sirius, Real Jazz on XM. And although both play a range that runs from Armstrong through Ellingtonia to the latest neoclassicist, both also have a strong hard-bop backbone. The main difference is that Sirius draws heavily on the Blue Note catalog while XM relies more on contemporary recreators of the form — which, in my opinion, gives Sirius a slight edge. It’s been nice to tune in Pure Jazz early in the morning and hear some vintage Horace Silver or Lee Morgan or Art Blakey. On the other hand, if you hear “Miles Ahead” on XM, the Davis featured is more likely to be Osbert than Miles.
While both services offer a good range from near-jazz to the real deal, both seem to be in league with commercial radio in banishing the avant-garde. The most progressive thing I heard in three weeks of sampling the channels was a movement from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme suite on Sirius. Since avant-garde jazz has a nearly 50-year tradition, as well as many current practitioners, it seems reasonable to expect that a few regular programs would feature it, if not a whole channel.
When it comes to classical music, both services have a good Three Bs-and-beyond station. Sirius offers Symphony Hall, while XM has XM Classics (with the ambitious tagline “The greatest music of the last 1,000 years”). Sirius also has an all-chamber-music station called Vista, which is a nice alternative to have on those mornings when Horace Silver — or, for that matter, Gustav Mahler — seems too aggressive.
For rock, I heeded the generational call and spent some time with XM’s ’60s channel. But the problem there is that it was such a bifurcated decade — at some point in the mid-’60s, they changed the water, metaphorically speaking. So a typical 1962 song is very different from a ’68 one, and just as often as the channel played something that still sounded pretty groovy, they’d play something corny that my older sister might be into. But it’s all subjective, folks. For more unalloyed geezer kicks, I gravitated to Sirius’s The Vault (tagline: “Deeper cuts from rock’s legendary performers”), which is your basic Classic Rock station but with more leeway in the selections and minus — and this is important — the usual obnoxious commercials.
Overall, I was drawn to Sirius more often than XM, but when you’re suddenly faced with just over 200 new channels, the initial impulse is to check out what you already know to see if they’re getting it right. XM has some channels I haven’t made up my mind about yet — including Special X, a catch-all channel for ostensibly unclassifiable music, and Sonic Theater, which presents dramas, book readings, and other things spoken-word. And I’m sure both services have hidden crannies I’ll enjoy once I discover them. As when I first got digital cable, with its surplus of movie and music channels, checking out satellite radio has been a little overwhelming. But it’s also been fun scratching the surface.
— Richard C. Walls
The Hard Sell
Perhaps the most telling aspect of XM Radio’s approach to programming is the fact that, of its 101 channels — 71 of them are music-only, with the remainder covering news and talk — nearly two-thirds carry varying forms of advertising. (While none of Sirius’s 60 music channels carry ads, all 40 of its talk and news channels do.) Even more significant, though, nearly all of the remaining three dozen commercial-free music channels (that’s as long as you don’t count the many in-house and self-promotion spots as ads) specialize in the kind of music associated with “older” listeners — Classic Rock, blues, traditional country, jazz, classical, and so on.
That’s probably neither here nor there, except that the channels for the most narrowly defined of these genres — say, bluegrass or folk — often carry the kind of formulaic, antiseptic atmosphere associated more with prerecorded in-flight airline programs than “live” radio. Sometimes there are hosts, sometimes there aren’t — it seems fairly haphazard and gives older listeners the impression that they’re not quite as important a component of the XM audience as, say, the Bone Yard hard-rock crowd, where the more serious advertising bucks are. (To be fair, even the channels that carry ads don’t play that many — yet.)
In addition, some channels continually remind you of their targeted “uniqueness,” almost to the point of parody. Hank’s Place, for example, one of five XM channels devoted to country music, features a generally fine selection of mostly ’50s to ’70s mainstream hits by classic artists like Marty Robbins, Faron Young, Jean Shepherd, and Jeanne Pruett. Unfortunately, the vibe is seriously undermined by fake barroom banter between song sets that comes straight out of the “You May Be a Redneck” textbook. Similarly, the ’50s channel, while at times displaying a strong and hip playlist — Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush,” Sonny Knight’s “Confidential” — tosses in snippets of old ads and news items that fairly scream nostalgia. It’s precisely these sorts of age/genre stereotypes that this particular music-loving critic has spent a lifetime trying to demolish — and that ultimately make the XM experience less than meets the ear.
By contrast, I suppose the best way to describe listening to Sirius is to say that it’s “minimally invasive.” Sirius’s approach to programming makes clear that it wants to make good on its basic promise of delivering “100% commercial-free music” (outside of the network plugs and channel cross-referencing, that is). And it uses a generally low-key hosting staff of, as its introductory literature claims, “master music programmers and on-air personalities,” who only speak “to give information regarding the music being played.” Accordingly, Sirius often sounds like a college radio station in terms of both format and identity, with the scope and liveliness of the music and atmosphere on individual channels largely dependent at any given time on the DJ riding the airwaves.
So for me the better moments happen — not surprisingly — when some of the many veteran DJs on the Sirius roster are hosting shows. Admittedly, some of it has to do with familiarity: the Sirius studios are in New York City, and as an area resident, I have a built-in comfort zone associated with names like Meg Griffin (heard on the Folk Town and Organic rock channels), Ed Baer (the Sirius Gold oldies channel), and Jeremy Tepper (the classic-country Road House channel). Regardless of the degree to which the hosts make their presence felt in their song choices or words, however, what’s probably most noticeable across the board at Sirius is a subtle but underlying sense of basic respect for the audience. And in these days of sledgehammer radio, that’s no mean feat.
— Billy Altman
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| What's So Great About Satellite Radio? We went to four programmers from XM and four from Sirius and asked them. |