Thinking about maybe getting Sirius/XM?
If you aren’t familiar with Sirius/XM, there is an easy free way to try it out. First a few of the basics.
Sirius and XM used to be separate companies and had incompatible technologies, so at least for now you have to choose Sirius or XM. Each service added the “best of” the other side’s programming for an extra charge.
To try it out for free, try out Sirius Internet Only streaming. They offer a 7 day free trial here. XM also has an internet streaming offer, but you can only use it if you already own an XM radio.
The Sirius News/Talk shows are already integrated into the SRGuide, and they are similar to radio stations other than you’ll constantly be pestered to enter your account password and type in a 4 character string of random characters to make sure you are a human and not a computer program. [Is that really necessary?]
A few of the channels you can get with a real Sirius/XM radio are not available for streaming – the most significant is the one that Quinn and Rose are on. You’ll find that many of your familiar hosts area already on Sirius. The main exception are most of those syndicated by Premiere (Rush, Beck) and Neal Boortz. There is a Fox News Talk channel that carries Tom Sullivan and John Gibson, as well as Glenn Beck’s TV show (audio) on tape delay and a number of Sirius/XM only hosts like Andrew Wilkow. A show with 9 minutes of news/commercials feels a lot different than one with 27 minutes.
If you see enough value in what they offer, you can later buy a radio for your car or to carry around.
I’ve long believed that the Beck/Limbaugh crowd are a much bigger market for subscription radio market than the the 30 years old living at home people with drug problems that seem to be the core of the Howard Stern audience. If 5 or 10 million people signed up for Sirius/XM, that subscription revenue goes a long way to make advertiser boycotts futile.
If you do already have Sirius, tune it to channel 100 next week at 9 AM eastern. See if Glenn Beck being there was a mistake (or Stern playing a clip of Beck’s show) or if something is “up”.
No Beck today – that suggests that Stern was probably playing an extended clip of Glenn Beck in order to comment about it. I would be curious what Howard’s opinion of Beck is, since Howard is Mr Free Speech on Radio…. does that apply to “President Obama is a socialist” or only to profanity and talking about sex?