Thursday, January 3, 2008

Does The System survive the XM/Sirius merger?

XM's channel 82, The System, is probaby the single largest outlet for trance and related forms of electronica (in terms of the number of potential listeners it reaches) in North America. However, I see Internet rumors that the channel won't make the cut after the merger with Sirius. And it is my understanding (I'm not a Sirius subscriber) that Sirius has no equivalent channel, so it's not just a matter of eliminating a redundant channel. The rumor seems plausible, because The System is one of XM's few music channels that is not produced in-house; they buy it from Worldspace. The combined company will doubtless be looking to cut costs, and buying out-of-house music programming looks like a big target.

3 comments:

NuclearSecret said...

Confirmed. It's gone from the radio lineup as of today. Still available as an "Online-only" channel for current subscribers however. This makes me very sad, since I don't fly to and from work on a wireless laptop.

Me said...

Yah i just cancled my mobile broadband cause its getting to expensive for now and then they go and pull the system wow thats super gay, to me the cost benefit of dropping world space wont make up for the loss of subscribers but thats just me. Though xm was home to the best original music guess i was wrong, this merger is ubber queer, undo it and make the stocks back to were they were, come on fcc rethink what you have done. I was a suporter of this but yah f this!!

Dave Cornutt said...

I just noticed these comments... sorry; my excuse was that this post was buried on page 3 of my post index. You guys must have found the post via a Google search. I'm about to post an update.