I’ve been an avid XM Radio fan for many years, since I heard of the concept of satellite radio. This isn’t just because I’m a tech geek, but because at the time I was living in Lake Tahoe and radio up there sucks… a lot. There aren’t many local stations to Tahoe, stations from Reno can be sketchy at best (hell, I got better reception from some Sacramento stations)… and signal generally sucks all around.
So the day XM Radio went live in the West coast, I got a receiver installed in my truck. It was glorious. I could listen to crystal clear radio 24/7, no matter where I went. In those days I drove a good bit too, so it was well appreciated. I could drive from Reno to the Bay Area and I’d lose coverage for maybe 15 seconds total (in the Mountains). I quickly found a small number of stations that I enjoyed, and have continued to keep those stations as my favorites to this very day.
The station that became my favorite was BPM (XM 81). It played great techno/dance all the time and their weekly countdown called “33.3” was great to listen to. It was safe to say that at least 90% of the time my radio was tuned to that station and I almost wanted to change. Sure, the occasional song came on that I didn’t like and I’d switch off for a while, or I just wasn’t in the mood, but that was rare.
Well times have changed. I noticed over the last year that they moved from a format of all radio edits with a few DJ Mixes (generally on Friday & Saturday nights), to all DJ mixes. I’m sorry, but it is just lame now. I like some DJ Mixes, sure, but I don’t want to listen to them constantly. I want to listen to the music BEHIND the mixes. And of course, since they aren’t playing radio edits much, they dropped their weekly countdown. In fact looking at the schedule now, they are playing radio edits between 5am and 8am tomorrow, and that’s it.
I wish I could blame this on the merger with Sirius, but this happened long before. My only hope is that XM/Sirius will spawn out a new techno/dance station that actually plays radio edit music or one will be merged in from Sirius. Sort of like how MTV2 got started because MTV was no longer playing any music videos — just the crap reality shows. One can only hope for some savior of XM’s dance music…