XM/Sirius, Who's Making Decisions Over There?

First, let me say that I have XM in my car. I enjoy it, I do, on the occasion that I use it. I more often prefer listening to my iPhone or some MP3 CDs I've got lying around - in those cases I know that it's going to be music I enjoy.

But let's face it. You're an unstable company. When I first signed up after my free trial ended, you gave me some options for subscription: month-to-month, three months, a year, 2 years and 3 years. Obviously, the longer a period of time I signed up, the cheaper it was on average. But not that much cheaper. Throwing down the hundreds of dollars for a 3 year deal only saved me $4 a month; not exactly blowing me away with that kind of savings. Based on the fact that I don't know if you're going to go under, or if I'll even want to keep it, I decided to do month-to-month for the time being.

After I navigated your horrendous website, and downloaded some files and gave them file extensions which you seem to have forgotten, I was able to actually sign-up. Not an easy task. Seems foolish, since that is the source of your business. I later realized after checking my bank statement, that despite my choice of month-to-month, you've signed me up for three month plan. Whatever. I'll let it slide.

Great - so now I have a service that you're providing me that I want. It's actually pretty good too, despite you constantly changing the channel lineups on me. What's that? XM and Sirius are the same company? Awesome. Boy, would I love more options. Oh, wait. I have to pay to get a subset of what Sirius offers? If you can deliver the Sirius signal to my XM radio, why can I only get some shitty sports stations and Howard Stern? If you're going to make me pay, at least give me the full set of options. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the technological hurdle here, but you should at least give me a few freebies or a trial period and try to hook me.

Also, I thought XM was commercial free, and primarily chatty-Kathy free. If your subscription prices weren't enough to subsidize the business, you shouldn't be touting commercial free radio if you need to rely on advertising as well. I understand that cable providers have this same model: ads supplement the stations and the subscriptions supplement the technology provider. That makes sense, but you don't hear Comcast saying "Commercial Free TV!" and then just giving you commercials anyway.

Guys, here's my final gripe. I like listening to XM Radio online. I do it from work pretty often - it's great to have in the background while I slave away, or to crank up some holiday tunes in the office during the season. I got an email from you not too long ago saying that soon, this feature will become an additional charge on top of my subscription. What the hell? Let me get this straight. You're going to take something that I already pay for, and take it away from me, and try to charge me more for it? I don't even respect you as business people anymore.
Try this model on for size: offer the streaming-only portion of your business as a separate service (and update the UI while you're at it) and charge something like $3.99 a month for it. Then, you can bring in people on the low end and get them hooked and eventually sell them on a bigger upgrade for listening to music on a device or in their car, which is your full subscription. That full subscription should include listening to XM online as part of the cost, since it's already part of the cost now. In fact, doing it this way requires less infrastructure changes on your side.

Despite you not being very good at whetting the customer's appetite or offering a simple way to sign up and receive the service, once someone manages to get through all of that, it's actually pretty enjoyable. That final gripe I mentioned might be enough to make me cancel the service, and not even because I use it a lot, mostly just based on principle. Sorry to say, I don't care one way or the other if you go under or not. You've done a pretty poor job at making me a loyal customer. Hopefully things change, but if not I won't cry about having an XM button in my car that does nothing. That will just inspire me to put a Mac Mini in my car instead.

- Brandon

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