When I first heard about satellite radio being launched years ago, I thought there was no way the idea would work. I mean, people were going to pay more than $10/month for _radio_? You can get that for free!

Well, I guess that I didn’t count on the ongoing mainstream radio consolidation and format compaction that took any life out of radio that still remained. People clearly had a pent-up desire for diversity in radio.

Today I noticed that XM passed “4 million”:1 subscribers and is well on their way towards their goal of hitting 5.5 million by the end of the year. Add that to Sirius’ goal of 2.7 million subs by year end, and you’ve got a pretty big market — well over a _billion_ a year in revenue between the two by my calculations.

[1(AP reports on XM passing 4 million subs)]http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050516/xm_subscribers.html?.v=7

Ever since the _real_ Napster died a few years ago, I’ve really been turned off on music. The original Napster opened up a whole new way of experiencing music. That is, you could share and listen to *lots* of music. Of course, the _free_ part didn’t hurt either, but this was really secondary to the _diversity_ of the music offered. After Napster died, the thought of purchasing a CD or even an iTunes song was really unappealing. Most of the fun in music, at me at least, was in the discovering of new music.

Napster’s sharing feature was really pretty primitive, but it was effective. I remember that you could click on any Napster user’s name to view a compete list of their catalog of music — at least the list of music that they had in a “share-able” folder. Not everyone shared, but a lot did. I discovered some great, eclectic music this way. In fact, this eclectic mix of music became the only music I listened to.

This is why I am sooo stoked about subscription music services and especially Yahoo! Unlimited (yeah, there are other subscription services, but are they going to be around in five or 10 years?). Subscription services offer the potential for sharing and discovering music — much like the old Napster. Of course, all of these services need to work on expanding their catalogs, offer better ways to share music and support standards (like Yahoo!’s support of the “XSPF”:1 XML playlist open standard).

So, to offer a little sharing to digital music universe, here’s a new album that I’m kind of liking. It’s a bit sappy and poppy, but good background music. I saw Ben Lee several years ago, and can say that he’s got a lot of talent.

“!/img/Album_Art_ben_lee_awake_is_the_new_sleep.jpg!”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00078GIAQ/qid=1116260631

BTW, I *hate* the fact that you can’t just copy a URL from the Yahoo! Music client. It’s a client that sort of looks and works like a browser, but really isn’t. Kind of feels like it was designed by a committee. Therefore, the album art above is linked to Amazon’s site.

Like I said, these subscription services need some work.

[2(Amazon link to Awake Is the New Sleep)]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00078GIAQ/qid=1116261013

[1(XSPF site)]http://www.xspf.org/

You gotta love Om Malik’s blog called “Om Malik’s Broadband Blog”:1. Om is one of the most prolific bloggers around. You can find Om’s blog listed in my “Zoinger”:3 Bloglines public area ( in addition to most of the other blogs that I read regularly ). Om’s blog is in the _Communications_ folder. I’m still adding blogs to Bloglines from my old-school bookmarking method of blog consumption.

Back to the subject of this post, an article in today’s WSJ “_TV Networks Go Online to Capture Wider Viewership_”:2 reports on how TV Networks like MTV, The Food Network and others are launching new broadband “channels.” Of course, Om beat me to the punch on this one and has a post on this article “here”:4. Om comments that if the TV Networks really _got it_ that they would be making use of “_torrents_”:5 to distribute their content. Totally agreed, but of course, this would require some out-of-the-box thinking on the networks part… not just reacting to the fact that their viewers are going elsewhere to find content.

Where are viewers going? Simply follow the money. In this case it’s advertising dollars (yes, a trailing indicator, but one none the less). This year advertising dollars, as reported in the WSJ article, are forecasted to grow: For network TV about 2%, cable 10% and the internet *_25%_*.

[5(Wikipedia on torrents)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent

[4(Oms post Reinventing TV for Broadband?)]http://gigaom.com/2005/05/16/reinventing-tv-for-broadband/

[3(Most of Zoingers must-read blogs on Bloglines)]http://www.bloglines.com/public/zoinger

[2 ($$ WSJ article TV Networks Go Online to Capture Wider Viewership $$)]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB111620481901334224-search.html?vql_string=tv+networks+go+online%3Cin%3E%28article%2Dbody%29&collection=wsjie/archive

[1(Om Maliks Broadband Blog)]http://gigaom.com/

I’m starting to get a little comment spam here and there. I knew it was going to happen soon. The first step that I took was to introduce “captchas”:2 for comments, but I knew that this solution was not very robust (i.e., the vocabulary in my captcha plugin is very simple — yeah, I have to improve that — and spammers can get around the captchas by trackback spamming and through my mobile interface which doesn’t support captchas yet).

A more robust blog-spam solution can be found “here”:1 if you are running WordPress 1.5. I’m going to have to take some time in the near future to implement some or all of these solutions.

If you are new to blogging, an alternative to running your own blogging software is to use a service like “TypePad”:3. TypePad is a paid-for service, but offers lots of customization potential. If you don’t need to customize your blog that much, there are lots of free services like Blogger, Yahoo! 360, MSN Spaces, etc. It seems logical that a service should be able to do a much better job of combating spam than an individual.

[3(Groovy TypePad service)]http://www.typepad.com

[2(Zoinger post on captchas)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/04/26/authimage-a-captcha-plugin-for-wordpress/

[1(Keeping your WordPress 1.5 blog spam free)]http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-keep-your-wordpress-15-blog-spam-free/