My favorite form of vacation is to just throw my maps and my cameras and my luggage in the car and just drive.  I love taking long cross-country road trips.  When satellite radio came along, I figured it would be ideal for that.  How wonderful, thinks I, to be able to dive from one coast to the next and hear your favorite radio station the entire trip.  If I wanted to taste the local fare, I figured I could always switch back to broadcast radio.

I had actually stopped listening to broadcast radio long before satellite radio came along. Too many commercials and too little content worth listening to.  And then the hate jockeys of talk radio came along, to drive the final nail in.  I grew to loath radio.  It was driving across the so-called heartland of America one trip, and hearing nothing but hate, hate, hate on the local broadcasts, that finally convinced me to get satellite.  That was when I owned the little green Geo Prism.  By the next year’s road trip I had the Honda Accord, which initially came with XM.

But I wanted Sirius.  I’m a gay man, and what appealed to me about Sirius was it had a gay channel. XM didn’t. An additional plus was that I like big band/swing music and Sirius had a channel specifically for that and all XM had was a general 1940’s music format.  But you have to appreciate that having a channel dedicated to a gay audience really appealed to me. When it comes to mainstream broadcasting, you feel less like a part of the audience and more like a topic for discussion. Particularly during sweeps months.  So when I bought the Honda Accord back in 2005 I actually had the factory radio ripped out because it was XM only, and had a conversion kit installed that allowed me to install an off the shelf Sirius car radio. 

I blogged about that effort previously Here.

For about half a year after I installed it, I enjoyed listening to Sirius immensely. Then they changed the channel lineups.

OutQ was still there. But Swing Street was gone.  Just…gone.  I was actually listening to Swing Street more then OutQ for reasons I’ll go into in a moment.  So when they dropped it I was really pissed.  At first they made the channel into a general all purpose "American Standards" channel.  It eventually became the All Frank Sinatra All The Time channel. I complained over and over again on their customer support email address, which I take it gets routed straight to /dev/null.  Of course nothing came of it.

But that wasn’t all.  Air America hopped over to XM.  Then the trance channel, Area 53 moved to channel 33 and was renamed Area 33 and the format changed slightly.  Now they only play trance at night.  I found when I got Sirius that I kinda like listening to trance while driving.  Something about the relentless beat combined with the asphalt zooming past just clicked with me.  Now I could only listen to trance at night.  And Spa 73 went from New Age to International music and became completely unlistenable.  I’m not a big New Age fan, but it’s nice to listen to while driving, or doing household chores sometimes.

Okay…there were still the classic rock stations.  But the more I listened to them, the more I found them playing the same songs over and over. After a while I just stopped listening.

Out of over a hundred channels I’d have thought there was room there for the formats I liked to listen to. And they Were there for a while. But then they just…went away. And what replaced them was crap. Hadn’t I been there before with broadcast radio?

And what of OutQ?  It’s too raunchy most of the time.  Particularly Derick and Romaine.  I don’t mind there is room for adult format radio on satellite. I think that’s great actually.  But for the same reason I really don’t like my DVD catalogs stuffed with tons of pornography simply because I’m a gay man, I really resent the implication that because I’m gay, all I want out of a channel that targets gay folk is raunchy sex talk.  I was hoping for more like the Signorile show and Sunset Cruse, which is a really sweet love song call-in dedication show that runs late on Sundays.  I loved Sunset Cruse.  Absolutely loved it.  I used to listen to it constantly while I drew my political cartoons on Sunday nights. All the heartfelt love that came through on that show really kept my spirits up while I was drawing cartoons about the latest spew of anti-gay bigotry in that week’s newspapers.  It was sweet, it was heartfelt, and it raised my spirits to face the coming week.  If it wasn’t for those two things, Signorile and Sunset Cruse,  I wouldn’t bother with OutQ at all.

Oh…wait…  They recently replaced Sunset Cruse with…Derick and Romaine.  Well we all know that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…

So.  The gay channel didn’t turn out to be as great as I’d hoped, and like everything else on Sirius I enjoyed when I first signed up, it’s gone into the trashcan.  My swing channel is gone…I can put my iPod’s classic rock playlist on shuffle and hear more variety then I get on the classic rock stations on Sirius…the symphony hall channel is too hard core for me and the pops channel too lite…they only play trance for half a day now on the trance channel…and Spa 73 is almost unlistenable now.

I was actually contemplating putting the factory radio back into the Accord before I traded it in.  The only thing that kept me from doing it was Signorile and Sunset Cruse.  When I got the Mercedes last October, it came with a Sirius radio.  Now Sunset Cruse is gone…replaced by Derick and Romaine’s crappy  piss bar raunch.  I still listen to Signorile.  I pop it on occasionally for the trance channel when I’m driving at night.  But I find myself now scanning the channels for something…anything…worth listening to and I can’t find it.  Luckily the Mercedes sound system is iPod enabled.  I recently upgraded the pre-amp coming off the AUX input on the Mercedes sound system…the sound levels for attached iPods were too low and people were complaining and Daimler listened.  Now the iPod sounds as good as any CD, and it holds tons of music.  I have a swing playlist on it that I can play in shuffle mode and imagine I’m listening to Swing Street again.  I wish I’d captured the station ID when it was still on the air.

New music? For now I’m getting it on Pandora.  At least until the RIAA kills internet radio.  If I could get internet radio in my car I would be happy again. Especially Pandora. Seriously, the music industry should be paying Pandora, not the other way around. I’ve bought more new music listening to Pandora in the last year then in the previous ten. In the meantime, when my current Sirius subscription runs out, I’m not renewing.

The music industry is going to kill Pandora, and Internet radio.  They want to kill satellite radio too, but it looks like its killing itself just fine.  I guess they figure they have to so we can all be pushed into listening to mass produced lowest common denominator crap.  But I won’t be pushed.  I’ll just stop listening.  And…buying.