Friday, May 11, 2012

WSIX


I bought a 2013 Hyundai Sonata today.  My Chevy Blazer still runs fine but now that I commute 50 miles round trip to work I decided it was time for a vehicle that gets more than 19 miles per gallon (you can see Old Blue has been relegated to parking on the street.)  I haven't broken out the manual to figure out all the dashboard controls yet but I've definitely been messing with the radio.

The car comes with a free three month trial of SiriusXM satellite radio which is something I'd never heard before.  XM offers dozens of news/talk and music channels from almost every genre but after  sampling it for awhile I decided that there were only about 5 that I could see myself listening to regularly.  At this point I also don't need yet another monthly payment.  I guess I'll just enjoy it while it lasts.

A bumper sticker from "Open Road", an XM talk channel aimed at truckers.  After the controversial merger between Sirius Satellite Radio and XM, the Sirius Trucking Network combined with Open Road to form Road Dog Trucking.

I was surprised to find out that 5 Clear Channel-owned terrestrial radio stations could be found in the SiriusXM lineup: Top-40 KIIS "102.7 KIIS FM"/Los Angeles, Adult Contemporary WLTW "106.7 Lite FM"/New York, Top-40 WHTZ "Z100"/New York, Urban WGCI/Chicago, and....

98 WSIX, a Country station from Nashville, Tennessee.

2 comments:

KoHoSo said...

As I recall, Clear Channel had its hand in other programming on XM as well when it was still a separate service. I guess these are the deals even a supposedly competing service has to make when one conglomerate becomes so large and powerful. In retrospect, I wonder what the overall influence of Clear Channel was (or is) on SiriusXM. As one that listened to a lot of different stations on that service, I found that even ones that were supposed to specialize in "deep cuts" became much more repetitive. After loving XM when I got it with my own new car in 2006, I cancelled SiriusXM because, to me, it became no different than what I could get for free.

Greg said...

I'm impressed by the number of channels offered by SiriusXM but underwhelmed by the music programming on the few that I would listen to. The 80s on 8 and even the First Wave channel were way too mainstream for my tastes.