Satellite Radio’s Music Channels Slightly Less Compelling Than Stern, C-Span

noah | February 28, 2007 12:38 pm

Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired’s Listening Post blog is at the Digital Music Forum East this week, and he noted a somewhat odd statistic:

But at the first day of the Digital Music Forum East conference yesterday, Music Choice CEO David Del Beccaro, who occasionally affected an overly calm voice in a possible attempt to make the other panelists sound frenetic by comparison, dropped an interesting piece of satellite radio science during the kickoff panel, “The State of the Digital Music Union.”

He claimed, “music is fourth on satellite radio behind Howard Stern, sports, and news.”

Given the increasing sagginess of the music market these days, this factoid doesn’t surprise us much; both Stern and live sports broadcasts are exclusive “gets” for satellite-radio customers, while the music stations can sort of be replicated by a person’s home music collection or, in very isolated cases, local radio. It does make us wonder, though, what will happen to the bandwidth devoted to music should the proposed XM-Sirius merger happen. Obviously, there will be some consolidation–there are currently six stations devoted to classic rock between the two services, and that doesn’t even count the oldies channels devoted to more splintered takes on the form–but will the merger give the merged companies a convenient excuse to trim down the number of music channels? We suspect the answer is yes, although we’re guessing that, through some cruel twist, Radio Margaritaville will remain standing while both channels devoted to classic hard rock get wiped clean.

Music Lags on Satellite Radio [Listening Post]