May 16th, 2005

Satellite Radio — Boy, I Was Wrong

Permalink | ~ Radio

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 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.

2 Responses to “Satellite Radio — Boy, I Was Wrong”

  1. randomtruth Says:

    I think there’s some softness in those numbers… pretty sure they count all the people that are getting the first year free when they buy a car equipped with XM… OnStar does the same thing.

  2. Zoinger Says:

    Yeah, probably lots of “freebies” in the numbers… but even if you took out… say 20%, it’d still be a big trend.

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