I saw the other day that Sirius/XM has an iPhone app.  Neat, I thought.  Until naturally I saw the details.  It’s extra, on top of a subscription fee that I have been wondering for months now why I keep paying.

Oh I know…mostly.  It’s for OutQ…the only gay radio station on the planet.  Well…there’s a German one I found using Wunder Radio.  But it only plays dance music.  At least it doesn’t have the inane chit-chat programs that OutQ does.  The only thing I ever listen do on OutQ these days is Signorile.  And he’s the only reason I’d want Sirius on my iPhone.  I have tons of other music and talk options on the iPhone.  I don’t need Sirius for either one.

So to ask me to pay extra above and beyond the normal subscription price is more then too much to ask.  When I first signed up Sirius had a lot of content I liked.  They’ve systematically removed or destroyed most of it.  Swing Street is gone.  It became…somehow…the All Frank Sinatra All The Time station.  When they bought XM they brought over its 40s station…but that seems to always play the very worst most saccharine stuff my parent’s generation ever listened to.  I don’t think they’d even bother with it were they still alive.  The Trance channel is only trance part-time these days.  The "New Age" channel became the International Music channel and it really eats toxic waste.  The classical stations never play anything worth listening to.  The sixties channel seems to just play the same set of songs over and over.  I scan the dial and I hear nothing, Nothing, that is worth my time.  In the car these days, I mostly listen to my iPod/iPhone, or the CD player. 

Why am I paying money for this?  Well…because it’s still handy to have when I travel cross-country.  But only barely.  I can plug my iPhone into the car stereo and hit "shuffle" and hear more songs I like then I can on Sirius.  For hours at a time now I am listening to the iPod while driving.

Hey Sirius…bring back Sunset Cruise and I might reconsider.  I’d take that to mean you are taking your gay listeners seriously again.  Sunset Cruise was this sweet little call-in show where gay folk would call and dedicate a song to the one they love.  They ran it Sunday evenings and it was a perfect way to end the week.  I used to listen to it while I was drawing the weekly political cartoon for my web site.  It was just the thing I needed to remember why the struggle was worthwhile, and life was good after all.  It’s DJ, Pat Marino, has set up his own Internet broadcast Here, called The Heartbeat Cafe’.  If he was still doing Sunset Cruise on Sirius I wouldn’t hesitate to add that iPhone app to my subscription.  But you seem to think the kind of raunchy talk you hear constantly on Derek and Romaine is all gay people want to listen to. 

If there were no OutQ I wouldn’t even bother subscribing.  But its programming is way too narrowly focused on an urban gay stereotype that isn’t most gay people.  It had more bandwidth a few years ago.  But then, your entire channel line-up had more variety then it does now.  You are not competing with broadcast radio anymore.  You are competing with the iPhone and iTunes and the Internet.  And just like the newspapers, you are loosing because you are stuck in an old business model and you keep thinking you can drag your customers back into it somehow and you can’t.