Reopening Old Wounds

Couldn't agree more with my friends over at Slicing Up Eyeballs about just how horrendous Sirius is compared to what XM was. Two months after writing this blog post about the Sirius-to-XM changeover, we canceled our subscription. The song selection and DJ chatter was just too much to warrant paying for anymore. We've had trials of Sirius/XM in two new cars and rental cars and, until recently, as a part of our DirecTV package, but there is no reason to suffer Sirius' shallow playlists and annoying, superfluous announcers.

The “Dark Wave” show was always a lone bright spot with regards to providing deeper cuts, the closest thing to Fred Sirius ever did, but the problems are still apparent (maybe even exacerbated) in the three hour show. Looking over the playlist from last night's show (found here courtesy of Slicing Up Eyeballs, along with their commentary), it doesn't account for the annoying presence of the DJ, but it does speak to the songs. If you're only devoting a few hours to this, and given how much great music is out there, do you need to average one Joy Division and one Cure/Cult Hero song per hour? Of only 38 songs played, nearly half of them (16) are from just seven different artist.

While I understand giving Sirius credit for the effort, “Dark Wave” has always struck me as an excuse for the company to say, "See? We didn't completely change. We still play this music.”

Relegating Fred from a full-on channel to a weak three-hour show with horrible DJ babble is not preserving a station, and was never going to be enough to satisfy this fan.