Now that the XM/Sirius merger has been approved by regulators who are supposed to look out for the American people but who instead are more interested in whoever has the money, it’s time to start the tributes for a dead industry. Oh, I know what the companies are saying, that they’ll emerge “stronger and better able to face the future,” but the truth is, now instead of one of the two companies finally going into bankruptcy, the sole remaining monopolistic company will fail and take the entire industry down with it, driven primarily by one man’s foolishness in giving an aging frat boy a half-billion dollars he never had in the first place.

As you probably figured out by now, I have been against this foolish merger from the get-go. It would have made a whole lot more sense to allow one of the companies to fail badly (HINT: not XM, since between the two it had a better chance of survival), to be picked up at bargain-basement prices by a new company with intelligent management who truly loved radio. Yeah, I know, but one can dream, can’t one? I mean, can you imagine what satellite radio could be like if there were two companies competing for the best sound and deepest playlists instead of who could throw the most money at tv personalities to kludge their stuff into low-bandwidth radio channels? Two companies who actually loved and knew radio?

Ok, so that ship has sailed; now former XM subscribers are forced to help pay off Hoo-Hoo and will be subject to the programming wizardry of Mel Karmazin, meaning shallower playlists and fewer niche channels…but you can bet there will be more major-label-sponsored single-artist channels (pioneered by Karmazin and already overused by XM even before the merger), wasting the bandwidth that could be used for small-based niche channels (anyone remember Lee Abrams’s extraordinary Special X?).

And then there’s the other side of the equation…lousy sound quality. The bitrate on the channels continues to fall…133’s The Bob Edwards Show is sounding anecdotally worse, with more of those compressed “Sssss” sounds than before - admittedly, the quality has gone up-and-down over the years as bandwidth is limited, then compression schemes are improved, then bandwidth is limited, ad nausium, but it seems to me it’s getting worse again.

And it can not get any better. Why? Because the companies have “promiosed,” as if it were a good thing, to add “Best of…” channels to each service with programs of the other. Even assuming there are only five channels added to XM (of course, that aging frat-boy will be one of them I won’t be listening to), that’s required bandwidth on a system already stretched so far it’s necessary to drop channels like Sonic Theater (a perfect example of a channel ruined by financial interests) over the weekend just to squeeze-in the barely-audible sports programming. Since any additional bandwidth is impossible, there are only two ways to deal with this - cut existing channels, or lower the sound quality even farther. I’ve warned about this before, and was basically poo-poo’d, but brace yourself, kids, here it comes.

And even pre-merger the programming, at least on the one I usually listen to, XMPR Channel 133, has been going to hades. Changes seem to be made for no good reason whatsoever; a few years ago, XM associated itself with the National Press Club to begin a series called From the National Press Club, originally broadcast on XM Public Radio at a reasonable hour but eventually relagated to 11:00pm Saturday evenings. Understand, for those of us with a Nexus, Inno, Helix, or the ability to hook any XM radio into a recording device (a violation of your Terms of Service, but nevermind that now), that didn’t matter. Anyway, XMPR suddenly, a few weeks ago, unceremoniously dumped the show in favor of Selected Shorts (yeah, there’s a replacement for a news program), a program that actually belongs more on the new-and-not-so-improved Sonic Theater channel (see earlier rant). The folks at the National Press Club are still producing the program, but it’s “moved” (or more accurately, dumped) into the POTUS 08 channel (the channel where, when they have nothing to say, they keep saying it over and over all day long) at 6:00 AM Sunday morning (to quote Arthur Dent, “Ever thought of going into advertising?”).

(Before I leave this, let me mention that those of us who love this program and look forward to it weekly no longer need XM Satellite Radio - the show is podcast at the National Press Club website. You know, more and more I’m listening to shows airing on XMPR via podcast. I hate to say it, but even 64kbps podcasts sound noticably better than the smooshed XM broadcast…)

Ok, normally, when a company ticks me off as much as XM has by allowing itself to be swallowed-up by a smaller, even more in-debt company, I’d tell ‘em to pound sand where the friggin’ sun don’t shine and never give them another dime of my money. But in this case, I’m completely screwed.

See, XM Satellite Radio is currently the only place in the world where one can hear The Bob Edwards Show every weekday morning. As I’ve mentioned more than once here on the blog, I am a creature of habit…I’ve been waking up to Edwards’ voice for pretty much all of my adult life, and there’s no way in hades I’m gonna stop now. Yeah, I know, I could get a sub to the show on Audible, but the sound quality is much worse than even the squishiness of XM’s reduced codec (as mentioned above, it’s gonna get a whole lot worse), so that isn’t an option. So at least one subscription must stay.

But…uh-oh, there’s my parent’s subscription, which I pay for on my family plan. Yeah, kinda screwed there, too, since my mother dearly loves her Orioles and with their XM radio can hear them whether she’s at home with a locked-out game, at their cabin in the mountains where the only terrestrial radio and television is religious stations, or even on vacation in Myrtle Beach or Florida. And when there isn’t a game on, they listen to The Heart (they used to love Sunny, until Clear Channel totally screwed it over). Nuts…can’t cancel that one, either.

So there’s only one of the three subs I can cancel…and that one is the one shared by my wife and daughter, both with Nexus players and different recording settings (Annie loves the Celtic offerings on Fine Tuning, where my daughter listens to country music, possibly because her father finds the sound of a pedal steel guitar no different from fingernails on a chalkboard). I suppose I could kill my Inno instead and use my Nexus (yes, we have three of them all sharing the same Passport, please don’t ask), but then the Passport wouldn’t make it into the car much, which would disturb my wife, so…

Damnitall, I’m totally screwed here. I can’t cancel any of the subscriptions, even though I know the quality of the sound, programming, and everything else is going to radically suffer as Mel brings his programming “expertise” to XM and continues the dumming-down process already begun by the current crop of talentless hacks. Although if Mel cans the Edwards show as I suspect he will (the guy wouldn’t know quality if it took a bite out of his keister, and Edwards only has two years left on the contract renewed by Hugh Panero before he left; not that Mel couldn’t buy it out sooner), all bets are clearly off, and I’ll be talking to retention faster than you can possibly imagine…