So now that Sirius and XM have merged
 

Ive been saying this for awhile. Record companies are fucked soon. All these guys have to do is start signing deals directly with independent artists, and doing some promotions for them and the record industry as we know it is done. Who buys cds anymore? If there is an album I want to buy I simply go and buy it online and download it to burn, or directly to .mp3. For that matter it wouldnt be a huge leap for them to sell hard media for music if they felt the urge. So if Sirius/xm make the leap I see the face of music as we currently know it changing in a huge way.

Opinions?

I wouldn't get ahead of myself it still has to pass the FCC, and they took like all of 10 minutes to strike down the DirecTV and Dish Network merger. I personally hope they don't merge because I would prefer to have choices, and I currently choose XM.

Dumb thread title.

what about audio on demand - via sirius/xm ?
buy an song / album - have it on demand anytime - anywhere

Dont you have a swamp to go play in. :winkwink: They announced the merger today.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070220/...m_sirius_dc_14

Id just love to see the record companies get beat down. So much good music, and talented people out there that never get a chance to be heard. Ive seen sooo many artists that record companies have turned down that make all the current acts out there look like 10th grade talent show rejects.

That is very true also. Download straight to your car, or via your mobile Satellite radio player and stored as .mp3. :thumbsup

Announcing doesn't mean anything...it has a LOT of hurdles to clear :2 cents:

Tony said it still has to be approved.

Even if they dont end up merging, what Im saying still has a good chance of happening. If all radio goes satellite then record companies could be in trouble.

I would love all radio to go satellite but I can't ever see it happening. Not everyone can afford to pay the subscription fees. It would be nice to see a world in where the artist gets directly paid for their hard work and for unknown artists to get a chance to get exposure without having to suck record company cock.

Its ridiculous what the hoops they want artists to jump through. Id like to just see Sirius and or XM do a fully independent station to start. Feature songs that are submitted to them directly from artists and small labels. Or even put up a website similar to what .mp3.com was and let the listeners vote on music that gets to be featured. Could open up some interesting doors.

XM does have an unsigned artist channel, but I don't know what deal they have with the artists. I'm not sure about Sirius.

XM really didnt have a choice, Sirius has been on a tear lately with adding suscribers and soon would overtake XM as the largest Sat Radio Provider. And as much as alot of people hate to say it, ALOT of it is due to Howard Stern bringing in the suscribers.

Ive had sirius for 2 years now, and i wouldnt give it up for anything.

agreed - well said

They are finally taking into account that this could be a monopoly.

The real question is it worth buying stock? Probably late not but should you have?

They'd need to do something about the sound quality if they wanted to start some sort of pay per song service. IMO they sound slightly worse than 128 kb MP3 quality, which isn't very good to begin with.

Their songs are way too compressed, at least on Sirius (never heard XM). The stations are great but the sounds quality does kinda suck on a good home system.

Interesting. You sure you have a good sirius unit? Or are you using an fm transmitter?

I actually don't own one, but two of my friends have them. They are fine in the car (running through FM modulator)... with the road noise etc. you hardly notice, but when they hooked it up to their home receiver through the RCA jacks and played it through decent speakers the sound quality just didn't seem up to par. Especially when you switch from a real CD to a Sirius station.

Don't get me wrong, it is still better than regular FM, but I definitely wouldn't consider paying per song for a file that highly compressed. I think some there are some people out there that think they are getting CD quality just because it is a digital signal, but they really do crank the compression up.

I believe I read somewhere that Sirius averages around 35kbs bitrate, although the codec they use is more efficient than MP3 so it's not an apples to apples comparison.

I have Sirius for Howard. I have XM in the car and love it for their music programming and better sound quality (on my current hardware).

Mike