Rumors of this were running around recently, but it's now a confirmed deal. Loveable, pot-head bio-diesel salesman Willie Nelson is coming to XM Radio with a whole channel to himself.
The new channel will replace
"Hank's Place" (channel 13) and will be, quite predictably, called "Willie's Place" effective July 10.
Namesake, Willie Nelson, will play cretive director for the new offering. Possibly the coolest part of all this, XM is building new studios for "Willie's Place" at Nelson's BioDiesel Truck Stop in Carl's Corner, Texas. The channel will begin broadcasting live from Carl's Corner in 2007.
Willie is a hep cat, and this shoud bring a depth of alterna-county programing to XM that SIRIUS can't currently match. With Country being a popular segment amongst a large portion of the US population, bringing a heavyweight name like Nelson on board can only be good for XM.
This is patent non-sense, as it's one of those ideas that isn't actually so much an idea as it is the natural progression of things. However, XM Satellite Radio has applied for a patent to incorporate HD radio transmitters into satellite radio recivers. Instead of the current FM modulators available in most radio models, XM seeks to add HD capability allowing a portable radio what is essentially a wireless digital input to a car audio system.
In the patent application, the company notes that its "high quality digital signal broadcast by XM Satellite Radio is ideally received by a digital satellite receiver for best audio reproduction, but in many instances an analog frequency modulation technique is utilized to reproduce the digital signal to take advantage of existing FM receiver car audio hardware.". As satellite radio owners know, "high quality digital signal" is a little bit of a misnomer, it's not exactly CD quality. An HD Radio modulator might help slightly, but you're still reproducing a compressed digital signal that is full of artifacts and noise.
Friday, GM, Delphi, and the United Auto Workers announced new agreements that expand attrition efforts at Delphi and push back court litigation until Aug. 11. This demonstrates a minimized risk of an employee strike at Delphi, which has negatively affected XM's stock price over recent months, according to UBS Investment Research analyst Lucas Binder.
"While we believe there would be minimal impact to XM's radio production from a strike, the detriment to GM's production and sales of XM radios in GM cars would be negatively impacted," said Binder.
Given the other external pressures faced by XM, it's nice to see some good news for a change. Even so, XMSR slipped another 21 cents to 13.39 before today's close.
Today SIRIUS announced that NFL Legend Jerry Rice will be hosting a show on the SIRIUS NFL Radio (channel 124). This follows last week's announcement that Andrew Wilkow will be hosting a Conservative talk show on SIRIUS Patriot channel.
Last week, on June 8, SIRIUS announced that Andre Wilkow, who is called "the next generation of talk radio" according the the press release, will be starting a new show on August 1 this year. Wilkow has been hosting a daily talk show on WGY- AM in Albany NY, as well as a weekend show on WABC-AM in New Your City. He will be hosting a weekday show from 12-3pm ET, airing on Channel 144 SIRIUS Patriot. Wilkow said of his move "Moving to SIRIUS lets me take that style and passion nationwide. I am honored to be given this opportunity."
But the wait for Jerry Rice is much shorter, as he will start June 13th co-hosting "The Afternoon Blitz" from 3-7pm ET with Adam Schein. He will be heard part time, being only on three times a week throughout the year. Rice joins quite a team of past players that are currently on NFL Radio on SIRIUS. Other past NFL players on NFL Radio include Cris Carter, Randy Cross, Gil Brandt, Tim Ryan, Pat Kirwan, Solomon Wilcots and Adam Schein.
SIRIUS continues
their signing ways with the announcement of the latest star coming to SIRIUS Stars 102. On May 4 SIRIUS released that
they had signed Deepak Chopra as a host of a weekly 3 hour live call-in show on Saturdays. His show is scheduled
to start in the summer later this year. Deepak Chopra, the author of over 42 books, said "I will be focusing
on four areas -- success; love, sexuality and relationships; well being; and spirituality. My hope is to develop a more
personal relationship with a back and forth communication, something that I haven't been able to do with my books."
Over at Libsyn's
Soundoff blog they posted a report on their numbers for the
first quarter of this year. What does the post cover? It starts with the number of unique IP addresses to libsyn.com
requesting feeds and media files. This is a huge number reported. They have over 45 million unique IP addresses for the
first quarter, and this is a 200% increase from the previous quarter. Thats from the previous quarter,
not to the previous year.
The post then breaks down the statistics on the podcatchers being used by those users. Apple's iTunes still has the
vast majority at around 72% which is reported as being almost a 5% drop from the previous quarter. The next category is
web browsers at around 22% of which Internet Explorer makes up the largest share at 12% of the overall
numbers.
No,
really. He did. The Pope got an iPod. On March 3rd, employees of Vatican Radio gave Pope Benedict XVI a 2GB Nano loaded
with Vatican Radio programming in several languages and some classical music. You have to wonder if someone sneaked on
some Eminem or Tenacious D. I now have images of the Pope up late, sitting in front of his computer in nothing but that
cool hat and some socks, checking Kazaa for tracks of his favorite Italian pop band and William Orbit remixes of
Barber's Adagio for Strings. So, if one of your less tech-savvy family members tells you she doesn't know how to work
her iPod, you can snidely reply, "C'mon, even the friggin' Pope knows how to use one!"
BigChampagne, an online media measurement company, introduced
its new BCDash product at South by Southwest this week. Until recently, BigChampagne could tell you how music was being
downloaded in the p2p space. Imagine if you were a record label, and you wanted to know how a certain band was faring in
the illegal download space (hypothetically, since your company no doubt screamed bloody muder about it being illegally
shared when discussing such things publicly). You could go to BigChampagne and find out downloading trends and where
your band was doing well; Wired
ran an article on them 2 1/2 years ago. Now, BigChampagne can still help you, but they have augmented their data
with sales information from the likes of iTunes, Wal-Mart, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music, AOL Radio, and Napster. The
company's name comes from the idea of using the data to see what bubbles up to the top. On a song by song or band by
band basis, one can see what's hot right now, without waiting for SoundScan data to arrive, which doesn't really track
what people are listening to anyway. BCDash gives practically a real-time view into music trends, allowing, as the Wall
Street Journal reports, record companies to adjust tours to give more exposure to a certain band in a specific
locale, or to rapidly change a promotion.
David
Lee Roth, who was put on the air in some markets as a replacement to Howard Stern, complained about managerial
interference during an interview on the Howard 100 news show on Sirius this past week. As reported in the New York Daily
News, the aging ex-rocker called his bosses "social retards" and other colorful names in response to
orders that he program his show for the Lynyrd Skynyrd set (...hey man, is that Freedom Rock?!) and stop speaking
Spanish on the air. Howard Stern, who is facing a lawsuit from CBS for breach of contract, reported the news on HowardStern.com, and according to Billboard Radio Monitor, Stern commiserates with The Grapes of Roth: "Bring a guy in, $4
million a year. Destroy him. And you can see they're setting him up to not pay him because they're saying he's not
cooperating." Apparently, Diamond Dave will also soon be given a female news reader a la Robin Quivers to play off
of. January's ratings for Roth show a steep decline in listenership of his target 18-34 year old audience in New York -
13.8% to 1.3% as reported in the Daily News - but that's no surprise. Those are some mighty big, crass, sophomoric shoes Dave has to
fill.
iTunes U will really do wonders for kids that
want to cut their college classes. Apple is providing the new
service free for universities and colleges (yes, there is a difference since one can grant
Ph.D.'s and one can't) so that schools can host educational content such as boring lectures, and those not-so-popular
interviews that happen from time to time. Actually, we're being a little facetious because we heard some cool stuff in
our college days; freshman year was the best three years of our lives! Apple indicated this is a hosted service, which
makes us wonder if they're trying to be the Google of the academic world. After all, hosting the collective knowledge
of the United States higher educational system isn't a bad business strategy, now is it?
The market is
all abuzz with thoughts that Microsoft has had about enough of Apple and its iPod. Not typically known for hardware, you
can't argue with Microsoft's success on the Xbox brand, but MSN Music is flea on the dog we know as iTunes. Microsoft
wouldn't bring YAPMP (yet another Portable Media Player) to market unless is was multi-functional; a device that plays
games as well was digital audio and video for example. If we were Microsoft, here's what we'd do:
Add Podcasting support in MSN Music. It's RSS for cryin' out
loud; you just put RSS support in IE7, so you know what we're talkin' about!
Get on the horn with XM and
integrate their new Passport receiver into
your device. Portability with satellite radio with gaming = fun.
Work with the Windows Mobile OEM's (you
remember them, right?) and get some killer VGA screens. We don't want any of that QVGA junk; 640 x 480 is the lowest
res we should have to accept.
Build in some WiFi support or better yet, piggyback some 3G cellular data
connectivity so we can buy digital music whenever we want.
Add Podcasting support to MSN Music. Oops. Did
we already mention that?
Let's open up the floor; you folks have the microphone, so what
would you do for a successful entry into this market? Does Microsoft stand a chance?
We
haven't swung by the local convenience store for the latest Rolling Stone mag, and after hearing Howard Stern's rant today, we're not sure if we will.
The whole Kanye as Jesus thing (complete with a crown of
thorns) might be a major put-off to any Christian readers, which is ironic since Stern is Jewish. So what's his
Howardness's beef? Apparently Mr. Private Parts was shot in the exact same way for Rolling Stone some
ten-odd years back when he wasn't the $500
million dollar man. So why didn't we ever see Howard as Jesus? Rolling Stone head-honchos figured that the cover shot would be too
controversial for the mag; like that never happens, right?
What's the deal? Kanye plays Jesus as an
African-American but Stern can't play the part as a white Jewish-American? Maybe it's just us, but Rolling Stone makes
it clear that what was controversial ten years ago sells magazines today.
That's right: if you've been
carrying one of those portable XM players in your pocket, that warm sensation just might be the battery. All three of
the XM portable players are susceptible to overheating batteries, so get that thing out of your pants and check with XM
for a new power supply. The voluntary recall affects the Delphi MyFi, Pioneer AirWare, and the Tao XM2GO, which we're now dubbing the "XM2HoT."
It's a big, bold move, but one that a company like Google
can pull off. With so many individual music sites like iTunes,
Rhapsody, Napster, and more, this was bound to happen. Google announced
a centralized music search that will let you find music by just about any search or metadata term you want.
Google has initially partnered with Amazon, iTunes and Rhapsody
so you can purchase digital music right through the search results.
When will we see browsers in our digital radios so we can just search
for the "tunage" we want to listen to? Hmmm....imagine a future with no
radio channels except for the personalized ones you create. Now THAT
rocks!
Droxy reader, hez, is looking for some help. hez writes: "Question! Help!: I am interested in this unit primarily so I can listen to Stern. I commute via my car or on train and from what I understand the unit only recieves a "live" signal while docked. How will I be able to listen to Stern each day if I have the unit with me on the train in the hours the show is on? Originally I thought that I could record Monday's show and listen to it the following day, but then I wouldn't be able to record the next days show because I will have the unit with me. I guess this is assuming that the Stern show will still be at its terrestrial radio time, right?"
It all sounds like a perfect plan: record your radio programming on the Sirius S50 while on the go. Get our thoughts after the jump!
Rumors of this were running around recently, but it's now a confirmed deal. Loveable, pot-head bio-diesel salesman Willie Nelson is coming to XM Radio with a whole channel to himself. 
This is patent non-sense, as it's one of those ideas that isn't actually so much an idea as it is the natural progression of things. However, XM Satellite Radio has applied for a patent to incorporate HD radio transmitters into satellite radio recivers. Instead of the current FM modulators available in most radio models, XM seeks to add HD capability allowing a portable radio what is essentially a wireless digital input to a car audio system. 
Friday, GM, Delphi, and the United Auto Workers announced new agreements that expand attrition efforts at Delphi and push back court litigation until Aug. 11. This demonstrates a minimized risk of an employee strike at Delphi, which has negatively affected XM's stock price over recent months, according to UBS Investment Research analyst Lucas Binder.
No,
really. He did. The Pope got an iPod. On March 3rd, employees of Vatican Radio gave Pope Benedict XVI a 2GB Nano loaded
with Vatican Radio programming in several languages and some classical music. You have to wonder if someone sneaked on
some Eminem or Tenacious D. I now have images of the Pope up late, sitting in front of his computer in nothing but that
cool hat and some socks, checking Kazaa for tracks of his favorite Italian pop band and William Orbit remixes of
Barber's Adagio for Strings. So, if one of your less tech-savvy family members tells you she doesn't know how to work
her iPod, you can snidely reply, "C'mon, even the friggin' Pope knows how to use one!"
David
Lee Roth, who was put on the air in some markets as a replacement to Howard Stern, complained about managerial
interference during an interview on the Howard 100 news show on Sirius this past week. As reported in the 
That's right: if you've been
carrying one of those portable XM players in your pocket, that warm sensation just might be the battery. All three of
the XM portable players are susceptible to overheating batteries, so get that thing out of your pants and check with XM
It's a big, bold move, but one that a company like 
Droxy reader, hez, is looking for some help. hez writes: "Question! Help!: I am interested in this unit primarily so I can listen to Stern. I commute via my car or on train and from what I understand the unit only recieves a "live" signal while docked. How will I be able to listen to Stern each day if I have the unit with me on the train in the hours the show is on? Originally I thought that I could record Monday's show and listen to it the following day, but then I wouldn't be able to record the next days show because I will have the unit with me. I guess this is assuming that the Stern show will still be at its terrestrial radio time, right?"
