Most of their music stations are basically well-curated, 4-hour playlists. Most channels have guest hosts/DJs that are legitimate to the genres (e.g. Diplo hosts his station at times) that update the playlists periodically. I still augment my music with Apple Music and podcasts, but I spend far more time with Sirius.

The unfortunate part is that they still play stupid and hostile pricing games. "Promotions" that you have to call to renew to get the stupid $25/month charge reduced to like $7/month. At that price it beats Pandora, terrestrial (am/fm) radio, and even Spotify/Apple Music if you primarily listen to curated playlists.

I am switching my subscription from satellite to streaming because I will save a pretty significant portion of the monthly fee, I stream everything else I listen to or watch at home, in the office, or in the car, and the CarPlay experience is much better when you are using 100% streaming audio.

I'm certain places like that exist, but I'm guessing it's far less than most would imagine.

My bet is a non-insignificant amount of sirus's money today comes from their model of making subscriptions really annoying to cancel. And, of course, preying on old people that may have forgot about their subscription or don't get streaming.

I wonder if it's worth waiting for T-Mobile's satellite features, or if I should move to Verizon?

Driving up from the SF Bay to Tahoe, you'll lose cell service as you pass through the mountains - especially if you take the Highway 50 route. Drive up to Oregon, and you'll lose cell service for a long stretch roughly near Klamath Falls. (As an aside, that part of the country doesn't even have NEXRAD weather radar.)

And this is all while on the freeway or major highways. There's plenty of places out west without a reliable cell signal, or sometimes a signal that's so weak that it's not usable for data.

For me it mostly replaces my CD changer, which doesn't exist in newer cars. When I can't decide what to listen to, have poor signal, or don't want to fiddle with the controls, it gives me a nice selection on fallbacks.

I mean my music is downloaded for offline use and I don’t want a radio style of listening experience, but for my parents it is the only viable way for them to listen to music on that drive. And with regular radio you’re going to be trying to find stations you want to listen to as you live in and out of range.

Granted my parents also have a grandfathered lifetime membership.

This is stuff like fishing recommendations by species, sea surface heights, temperature contors, 30m deep temperature condors, plankton concentrations, weather radar, storm tracks, wave heights, and more and then integrated into common Garmin, Raymarine, Lowrance, Simrad, and other equipment that many boats would already have. All of that data constantly updated and refreshed live even when you're miles out to sea and can't pick up common line of sight style transmissions.

Its not just a METAR weather report from an airport kinda near the shore.

It works out to be $120/year, and that's with Howard Stern, and all the sports etc.

Could I do all this streaming with my phone? Most likely, however with this I don't worry when I drive down into the States that I'm now "Roaming" or really worry about data usage at all. Also I don't have to think about it.

Given that, if free-trials convert at a steady rate, voila, you have growth.

In terms of why people like it:

1) There's something somewhat Tik-Tik-like about having hyper-specialized music served to you without putting in the work of building a playlist

2) Streaming services have the somewhat annoying tendency of 'recommending' new songs to you so they can pay the artists less, since they were a 'discovery' mechanism. This leads to bad outcomes if all you want is 80's on 8 (said differently, if you like 80's music, chances are you know the songs you like already)

3) The lowest their is $13/month, which is cheaper than a phone plan with more data for a lot of people

4) There's a certain 'Sunday Ticket/League Pass' element, since you can get the radio coverage of nearly any pro sports game (even in home markets I often struggle to find the radio coverage of certain games)

5) For the traditional satellite service, they're broadcast only so they have no idea what any subscriber is listening to at any point, and some people like that.

A few years later I was taking a multi state trip and reactivated, when I got back I re-subbed both vehicles. It's any kind of radio with almost no interruptions and it's worth the price.

Newer cars collect data on what you're listening to and report back. At least on mine it can be disabled, but it is something that's out there.

still gonna donate to Soma.FM tho

My dad subscribes for Bruce Springsteen's channel/show/whatever. Dude just can never get enough of Springsteen. I'd imagine there are other fans of other artists doing the same.

The app. Not the satellite. The satellite sound quality is horrible. I can see how satellite was worth it before 4G, but now I just use my phone in the car.

So Sirius XM there it is.

But with my current driving habits that's maybe one or two weeks a year where I would really care to have it.

In no way am i able to understand how radio would be a better alternative, but thats just my own bias.

Siris radio works everywhere you aren't driving next to something blocking the line of sight to the sky. It maintains the channel across significant distances so you're not hunting for "ok, what to listen to next?" (one time when driving to my grandparents house for Thanksgiving and changing the station as one faded I heard Alices Restaurant four times).

The main thing with Siris for driving is that its got DJs and news and such.

On my great road trip I had an iPod loaded up with songs and had that on shuffle for a few months... and while I had a few hundred hours of songs, they were all things I heard before.

Part of listening to the radio, Spotify, or Siris is that the next song might be something different.

---

https://4m3ric4.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33217395

I'm sure Spotify has its own advantages (I'm a long-time Pandora user, haven't tried it) but not having to plan anything in advance and having full access to all of the stations in the middle of nowhere is quite nice.

I just let myself be lured, and anticipate doing so next time.

Yes it’s dumb but sxm also works better for my personal situation than Spotify etc.

That's how I use Spotify, and I've gotten the impression that nobody at Spotify has actually eaten their own dogfood w.r.t. offline listening:

- Downloaded songs/albums/playlists will occasionally un-download themselves

- Even when they're already downloaded, the UI will occasionally insist on loading some online resource, preventing me from actually picking something out of my downloaded library until either I regain cell reception or the UI eventually gives up

Meanwhile, Spotify's radio feature seems to be getting progressively worse, and gaps are popping up in its library. Spotify was at one point the thing that got me to stop pirating music; I'm about ready to start doing so again (or buying from Bandcamp for the select few artists I listen to with music on there).

Sirius still exists because FM radio is absolute dogshit in the US thanks to the Clear Channel/iHeartMedia conglomerate effectively owning everything.

Your FM dial is absolutely terrible unless you happen to live near a good college radio station or an unusual city (San Diego can pick up some interesting Mexican stations, for example).

I've been subscribing for about a decade and I haven't experienced this. Possibly something in the tech stack here has improved.

> there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming that couldn't be had with a streaming service like Spotify

It's easier and cheaper to get satellite radio in a moving car than reliable Internet. You can save music offline (although I find a USB stick a much easier way of doing that than a smartphone with an app with offline storage, but then again most of the music I listen to is at least a couple of decades old), but you can't get live broadcasts of things like sports events or concerts.

I've listened to Sirius in several environments across many years, spanning most of its existence. In just about every case, I found the audio quality to be intolerably terrible. This is in multiple cars in different years. Curiously, I've noticed a strain of people that claim that it sounds good. Sometimes, I've been in the same car with them at the same time, listening to the same thing. I can't account for it. I'm generally not an audio snob, but satellite radio sounds so bad, I can't stand it at all. I'd rather have silence.

I'm not sure the underlying reason for this, but I guess some people just hear differently.

I would say it sounds good, exactly; I can notice a difference between it and, say, listening to a high quality recording from a USB stick. But I wouldn't say it's intolerably terrible, either. Is it that you literally can't hear music, just noise? Or is it that you can hear music, but with other noise overlaid on top of it?

I've also read the Sirius version is worse than the XM version. Yes, they merged many years ago but they still run two incompatible systems. Ford was still installing Sirius until 2021.

I wasn't aware of this. This would explain why I am not seeing the sound quality issues that other people in this discussion are describing; my latest vehicle has XM.

I'm about to leave. Every time I go to cancel, they hook me in with a pretty good deal. Last time it was "How about $9 for the next six months?" I thought they meant $9/month. Nope, a one-off charge.

But if I listen to any channel over the course of a day, I am guaranteed to hear the same song three-four times and their diversity/catalog seems very limited.

It may as well be dead because if you removed the regulation it would still be 90% noise.