A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

Satellite Radio

XM Satellite Radio arrived at a time when conventional radio was lacking in imagination and interesting programming. I could sell XM in my sleep because it was that good. It offered 170 channels of programming —80 music channels, most of them commercial-free. It had every nuance of rock, from the hits (Top Tracks) to the “other” cuts you always loved (Deep Tracks). There was a singer-songwriter channel (The Loft) and some alt rock channels. You’d find folk music on The Village and reggae on The Joint, country on America, honky-tonk on Willie’s Place, R & B on The Groove, hip-hop on RAW, Beethoven and Mahler on XM Classics, college radio on XMU, children’s programming on XM Kids, and dance hits on BPM (Beats Per Minute). There were five Spanish music channels, plus every kind of jazz, bluegrass, and soul music. The lower channels were the “decades” channels—The 40s on 4, The 50s on 5, The 60s on 6, etc.—channels that not only played the music of those particular decades but sound the way radio sounded in each period. When I heard the sound effects and jingles of The 60s on 6, my acne returned. There were channels devoted to religious programming, comedy, truckers, movies, books, women, and business news. The BBC, CSPAN , FOX, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, and the Weather Channel were all on XM—thirteen news channels in all, including my channel 133, XM Public Radio, which carried Marketplace, A Prairie Home CompanS AT E L L I T E R A D I O ion, This American Life, and all the public radio hits that were not from NPR. The talk channels covered the whole spectrum from left to right. P.O.T.U.S. politics twenty-four hours a day. You want sports? XM owned the sports world, and I think its strongest asset was that it carried every major league baseball game. Every inning of every game. XM signed an eleven-year contract with major league baseball to secure those rights, and I treasure an email from then-CEO Hugh Panero in which he said I played a role. He said that in making that deal, he was guided by the memory of all those Friday conversations I had with Red Barber. They reminded him that baseball, much more than football or basketball, is a radio game. It is, indeed. XM also had auto racing, ESPN, the NHL, and the PGA Tour. College sports abounded, as we carried the football and basketball games of the Big East, the Big Ten, the SEC, the Pac Ten, and the ACC—also postseason college baseball. There were many more channels—some permanent and some temporary to allow for maximum flexibility, plus an emergency alert channel for the people who believed the jihadists were looking into our windows. Truckers and others taking long highway trips loved satellite because they never lost the signal. Drivers and passengers heard the same channel coast-to-coast. If someone changed channels and heard a singer in midsong, he didn’t have to wonder who was singing because that information was shared by text right on the radio. It was a user-friendly service. I wish satellite radio had been around in the 1980s and 1990s because it was badly needed. Commercial radio programming during that period deteriorated, and radio existed mainly as a cash cow for the station owners. It’s no coincidence that public radio’s audience grew rapidly over those two decades. Listeners longed for an alternative to commercial radio’s tired formats, short playlists, rabid talk-show hosts, and incessant advertising. Satellite radio would have thrived during those decades, but you can’t rush the future. In 1992, the Federal Communications Commission allocated a spectrum in the S band for the digital broadcast of radio programs nationwide by satellite. In contrast to the 1920s, when our government 169 S AT E L L I T E R A D I O 170 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X gave away the AM band (and later the FM band) to already-wealthy people and institutions, the taxpayers got some money for the sale of any spectrum. Two companies paid $80 million each for a license to broadcast. One was Washington-based American Mobile Radio Corporation , which later became XM Satellite Radio. The other was New York–based...