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A lot of people who subscribe to satellite radio received something of a shock when they tuned in on Wednesday, and not because of faulty wiring.
Sirius and XM Radio, married this summer into Sirius XM Radio, ended the honeymoon for listeners. They did what companies always do in mergers: eliminate duplicate operations to cut costs, this time wreaking havoc on their respective programming lineups. Each service lost channels, and some of the survivors were tweaked, renamed and/or moved.
To hear the most vocal of suddenly dissatisfied customers, it was as if someone had broken in while they slept, made off with some cherished possessions, hauled in inferior replacements and left things in general disarray.
Sirius listeners found such channels as Movin’ Easy, Punk, Sirius Disorder, The Strobe, Boombox, Backspin and Universo Latino were gone. XM subscribers were without XM Sports Nation, X-Country, Fungus, Raw, Beyond Jazz, Fine Tuning, The System, Chrome, Viva, Aguila and Caricia.
It doesn’t matter that those weren’t the most popular channels.
For almost every channel out there, there’s someone, maybe several someones, for whom it was a favorite, providing the soundtrack to the daily commute, relief from the grind or just a welcome distraction. And, poof, it was gone. Or messed with.
What looked to the corporate types as a redundancy, devoted fans saw as a reason for continuing to shell out $8 or more per month even as the economy put a hurt on the household budget.
Some of the dissatisfaction probably was unavoidable. Some of the people who went with XM did so because they preferred its service to Sirius, and vice versa, so they weren’t going to be happy with any combination.
Compounding the resentment was that the best known channels on each service, such as Oprah Winfrey’s Oprah & Friends on XM and Howard Stern on Sirius, are available to subscribers of the opposite service only if they pony up more cash.
Radio listeners are accustomed to abrupt format and personnel changes, though they complain loudly about them. Because people pay for satellite services, they feel a bigger stake and see these kinds of changes as a promise unkept, a broken covenant.
Those listeners say this will spell the beginning of the end for Sirius XM, but that ignores the fact that Sirius or XM had to be in pretty bad shape to get the feds to approve their merger in the first place.
The combined company said last week that its third-quarter losses totaled $4.88 billion after recording a sizable charge connected to a decline in its stock.
It expects to have 19.1 million subscribers by year’s end and 20.6 million at the end of 2009, but the economic slowdown, especially its effect on sales of autos that will come with satellite radios, can hardly help growth.
That says nothing of potential technological advances that could outstrip what satellite radio can offer.
Many of these problems are not unique to radio.
People respond viscerally to changes in the media they rely upon.
In television, where even the least popular programs on the broadcast networks have audiences the size of small cities, viewers get furious when their favorite shows are canceled, moved or adjusted, vowing boycotts and launching generally unsuccessful campaigns calling for decisions to be reversed.
When print publications move, eliminate or change features, comics, columns, even typefaces, readers go through denial, anger and all the other stages of grief Elisabeth Kubler-Ross laid out.
The need to reinvent business models and make do with less in the media industry has brought a lot of abrupt change in a short span, upsetting consumers who inevitably predict that these actions hasten, rather than forestall, demise.
That is the price to be paid for having developed a dedicated customer base in the first place.
The media can’t afford to lose them, but it can’t afford to please them all either.
