I also found Sirius frustrating in the same manner. Except for me, it was my daily commute. I could set the clock by the playlist. I only listened to 2 channels and for some reason, the traffic updates to my car stopped working. When they wanted something like $400 to renew for 1 year, I said fuck off.

A tip for anyone reading here — SiriusXM will gladly give you a year of service for $60+fees (about $74 last time for me). You don’t even need to threaten to cancel. Every year I call, tell them it is too expensive, but I’d stay if they give me the same price, and they always do. Something like the last 10 years...

Yeah, reception to your in-car receiver was ridiculous. We switched over to internet-only for $8 a month and stream to our phones. I swear the bitrate is higher, too.

Way back before Sirius and XM merged, XM used to have a bunch of stations that were DJed by humans. I don't remember ever hearing repeated blocks of content on those. There were other channels that were DJed automatically, and those could get repetitive, but the channels with human DJs were always fresh.

Sadly, it appears they started firing the human DJs several years back -- see https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/02/10/will-firin... for an example.

When I'm on long enough trips to start hitting repetition, I change channels periodically. There are a handful I like, so rotating isn't a bad thing. But yes, I do wish each channel had more songs in rotation at any given time.

I find a streaming radio app to give the best variety of content. You can find any particular public radio show playing live somewhere in the US. And plenty of indie radio options as well.

This happened long before "streaming audio" or 'apps' were a real thing. Also I live in Canada and drove in USA & Canada. The roaming charges were astronomical and didn't include data. The situation isn't much better now, but atleast I have USA data coverage upto 1GB.

Cellphone plan options in Canada are punitive and oppressive. Getting coverage in USA & Canada is painful.

When I was driving in the States, data-usage was measured in kB.

The quality is also worse than FM in many cases. Satellite radio sucks for music.