… if you pony up, you find out you’re in the wilderness, not a member of any club, not one of any size, and that freaks you out and you abandon your subscription.

He’s right. And he’s not alone. And XM and Sirius only have themselves to thank.

Throughout both companies’ histories, as marketing efforts focused on the “big” names, i.e., Major League Baseball, The NHL, the NFL, Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, Oprah, Martha Stewart, Starbucks, Ellen DeGeneres, Tyra Banks, etc, what was weird and wonderful about satellite radio began to fade.

Having been been on the inside at XM, I witnessed it firsthand. And for a little while there we (the programmers) believed.

We believed in the true art of radio, the craft, the connection between great music and fans and the curator behind the scenes — a veritable magic of sorts, as those of you who came up through 70s radio knew all too well.

XM Cofounder Lon Levin knew this. Certainly, former Programming Senior VP and Chief Creative Officer Lee Abrams knew this.

Their vision, in the beginning, was all about celebrating that magic. And it was, truly, a beautiful thing.

But then former CEO Hugh Panero brought in the new guard: Programming Executive VP Eric Logan and John Zellner, terrestrial radio’s Infinity kings… not exactly purveyors of Abrams’ wondrous, contagious irreverence, the driving force behind XM’s once-upon-a-time magic.

Across many of the music channels, playlists were slashed and it seemed that XM was becoming a virtual mirror of terrestrial radio, just without commercials. Except, suddenly, there were commercials. Zoikes.

And still today, the channels that are most interesting, most human (XM Kids, X Country, Liquid Metal, Fungus, The Rhyme, Fine-Tuning, The Joint, The Loft, etc.) chug on but go virtually unnoticed. What’s worse is that the talented curators behind them remain grossly overworked and, sadly, underpaid. But that’s another story…

The fact is, collectively, XM and Sirius have a point: our other content options are numerous and in many cases better. So why would we keep paying for a service that’s become not all that different then terrestrial radio, which we can get for free? Good question. And I’d love to say that Mel Karmazin‘s gonna save the day. But it’s no secret that Mel’s a business guy, not a music guy. Certainly, he’s no Lee Abrams.

Yet, in theory, it could happen.

Maybe if instead of continuing to blindly throw marketing dollars at the anonymous masses, satellite radio got back to what it’s poised to do best: creating a haven for the “weird and wonderful” and thereby perpetuating the shared experience, a.k.a., Lefsetz’ membership to “the club.”

After all, the masses aren’t fans. And, I can’t say this enough, FANS are what you want. Fans invest in music. Fans invest in the club. Loyal, diehard, spread-the-buzz fans who, simply by virtue of their devotion, will sell your product for you.

And it just so happens that the most likely fans of things “weird and wonderful” are adults… age 35-65… 1/3 of the population… wielding $1 trillion in disposable income. Do I sound like a broken record?

Music Industry Professor Jerry Del Colliano, in a recent Post article:

Young customers don’t have the need that we older folks have to have someone knowledgeable about the music tell them what’s new. They have their social network to tell them what’s cool.

Damn straight. Earth to Mel!

So maybe if instead of trying to be everything to everyone, satellite radio embraced this rather sizable niche and got back to its roots of humans programming for humans, then maybe the magic would prevail and satellite radio would, at the very least, survive… or at the very best, emerge as our savior. Now that would be worth paying for.

© Outlandos Music^TM 2008