After five years, I have canceled my subscription to Sirius XM Radio. You can now add me to the 1.7 million subscribers the satellite radio service lost in the first quarter this year. My decision had nothing to do with Sirius XM’s new iPhone app, which has been criticized for not including primo programming such as Howard Stern or Major League Baseball (neither of which I’ve ever listened to), but it does have everything to do with these reasons:

1) The audio quality has declined. I’m not talking about reception quality, which has always been fine. I’m talking about the sound of the music. It might be just my ears, but the music on Sirius over the past year or so has increasingly sounded like poor-quality MP3s — not all the time, but much of the time. The audio has always been compressed on Sirius and XM, before and after their merger, but it sounds noticeably worse to me lately – to cram more programming into limited bandwidth, I assume.

2) The price has gone up. When I first started with Sirius, the price was about $120 a year. My latest annual renewal would have been about $150, more if I wanted online access to programming. This isn’t as big a deal, but it was still a factor.

3) Sirius bailed on Cinemagic. One of the most exciting things about XM for me was its channel devoted to nothing but film music. So when Sirius merged with XM, it was the main channel I was looking forward to. But immediately upon “adding” Cinemagic, Sirius pre-empted it with Christmas music (one of three such channels during the holidays), but it ran regular alerts saying that Cinemagic would be back after the new year. It was — for about a week. Then Sirius replaced it with an all-disco station — even though it already had separate channels devoted to 1970s and dance music.

4) My listening habits have changed. After converting my vast CD collection to high-quality MP3s, I pretty much listen just to my iPod (via my car stereo) while I drive. That change, coupled with the previous factors, sealed my decision to cancel Sirius. (But I do have to say that if Cinemagic had been added, I probably would have kept Sirius as a way to keep up with new releases.)

When I called Sirius to cancel, I was offered two months’ worth of free programming to stay on. I declined. My subscription officially ended last week. Thursday, I received an email offer to renew and get two free months and then three months at $13 each. I didn’t reply.

Here’s something interesting, though. A few days after my subscription ended, I received a survey asking why I had left. I filled it out, citing much of what I’ve written here. One of the questions asked if I would be willing to pay $6.99 a month for 50 channels of programming that I would choose. I’d actually seriously consider that, especially if it included Cinemagic, because that would neatly address most of my concerns. (UPDATE: See comments for why this won’t happen.)

Until that happens, though, I will be a former Sirius subscriber.

TAKE THE TECHNOBABBLE MP3 CHALLENGE!
Can you tell the difference between MP3s and the original CD?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 8:28 am and is filed under Audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.