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On my trip to South Carolina I got to listen to a lot of XM Satellite Radio, as the rented Hyundai Sonata had it installed.  It was initially exciting to scroll through over a hundred channels in good sound quality.  But, for me, the excitement quickly wore off and was replaced by disgust, when I realized what a ripoff XM is.

First and foremost, XM has commercials.  I don’t know if they are on every channel, but their talk channels certainly have commercials just like regular AM talk radio.  Second, XM uses annoying DJs like any FM station, who talk over the beginning and end of songs just like crappy FM radio.  I don’t know if it was just the receiver installed in the Hyundai, but the names of songs and artist appeared only briefly at the beginning of each track, and quickly disappeared to make way for the name of the channel.  You could press an “info” button to find the song name again, but that was annoying to do for each song which you didn’t catch the name of in the first three seconds.  The classical channels (of which there were only three) would give the title of a piece and its composer–”Haydn: Sym No. 42″, for instance–but didn’t display the name of the performers, which makes the whole enterprise useless for me.  There are channels devoted to music of the 1950s and 1960s, but both operate like the crappy oldies channels you know and hate, with an extra annoying DJ and that stupid choir that sings something like “good time, great oldies…”.  Plus, the ’50s channel played “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva, which is not a 1950s song at all.  Nor is “Raindrops” by Dee Clark, which they played right after.

This all may seem like small beans, but if I were paying for this service, and found it to be no better than terrestrial radio, I’d be enraged.