Satellite radio should be dead.
Not struggling. Not “facing headwinds.” Not pivoting to a new business model.
Dead.
I have a phone in my pocket containing essentially every song ever recorded, every podcast ever made, every radio station on Earth, several lifetimes of audiobooks, and an AI that will presumably hum something original for me if I get desperate enough.
And yet SiriusXM lives.
Not merely lives. It has tens of millions of subscribers and generates billions of dollars in revenue.
Why?
Satellite radio belongs to a very particular technological moment.
There was a time when it was genuinely magical. You could drive from Toronto to Miami listening to the same station. No hunting around the dial. No losing the signal outside Buffalo. No discovering that the only thing available for the next 150 miles was Christian talk radio and something called The Bear.
A satellite followed you across a continent.
Fantastic.
Then we invented the smartphone.
That should have been the meteor.
Instead, SiriusXM somehow became the cockroach of consumer technology.
And I think I know why.
The car saved it.
Cars are weird technological museums. They have enormous development cycles, remain on the road for 15 years, and are operated by people who absolutely do not want to troubleshoot Bluetooth while doing 120 km/h.
Satellite radio has one spectacular feature Spotify will never quite replicate:
You turn the car on and music comes out.
No phone. No app. No pairing. No choosing. No algorithm asking what mood I’m in. No notification that someone else’s AirPods have somehow stolen the connection.
Just press 60s on 6 and go.
We keep assuming the best technology wins.
It doesn’t.
Sometimes the technology that wins is the one that has removed one tiny piece of friction so completely that millions of people keep handing it $15 a month long after its reason for existing has disappeared.
Which is irritating.
Because every few years I look at satellite radio, surrounded by Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, podcasts, CarPlay and unlimited cellular data, and think:
Surely now.
No.
It’s still there.
And then, this week, I received some wonderful news.
Columbia House is finally dying.
You remember Columbia House.
The people who would give you an apparently impossible number of CDs for a penny, provided you accidentally entered into a commercial relationship from which neither death nor bankruptcy appeared sufficient to release you.
For a certain generation, Columbia House was the original spammer.
Before spam had a folder.
Before email.
Before the web.
They came directly to your house, on paper, over and over and over again.
And somehow they were still alive.
Until now.
After 71 years, Columbia House is finally shutting down.
Which should make me happy.
Instead, it terrifies me.
Because I look at SiriusXM and suddenly realize I may have misunderstood the timescale involved here.
Do I really have to wait another 30 years for this thing to die?
I’m 55.
I don’t have that kind of time.
And if you’re wondering why I have such a hate-on for satellite radio, it’s not just that I’m aesthetically offended by the continued existence of this geosynchronous fax machine.
It’s personal.
I receive maybe ten pieces of actual mail at my house in a typical month.
An astonishing percentage of them seem to be from SiriusXM.
I don’t even want to think about how many emails they’ve sent me.
And every few years, I lease a new car.
The dealer hands me the keys. I drive away.
Somewhere, deep inside SiriusXM headquarters, a light begins to flash:
HE HAS A NEW CAR.
And the entire symphony begins again.
Welcome to your free trial.
Your free trial is ending.
Your free trial has ended.
We miss you.
Come back.
Here’s 50% off.
Here’s 70% off.
Here’s three months for the price of a sandwich.
FINAL NOTICE.
An important message about your SiriusXM service.
Another envelope.
Another email.
Another offer.
I have tried ignoring them. I have tried unsubscribing. I have tried explaining through my silence, with what I believe is remarkable consistency over many years, that I do not want satellite radio.
Nothing works.
And now I understand why the company won’t die.
It won’t even accept that I don’t want to be a customer.
So congratulations, SiriusXM.
You have survived Spotify. You have survived the smartphone. You have survived unlimited cellular data, Bluetooth, CarPlay, podcasts and essentially the entire accumulated audio output of human civilization becoming available from the rectangle in my pocket.
Apparently the only thing capable of killing you is me changing my home address.
But after learning how long Columbia House hung on, I’m beginning to suspect that wouldn’t work either.
They’d find me.
Funny that you write about the ability of old technologies to hang around, when they should be long extinct. Today’s NYT writes about our longing for old technologies and in particular the mixed tape. Here is an excerpt below. Perhaps this emphasizes even more why satellite radio should no longer exist — it is not a tangible artifact.
The mix tape, that relic of another era, which “took time, thought, careful listening and a level of physical coordination beyond what goes into the making of a Spotify playlist.” Good mix-tape-makers were experts in manipulating the pause and record buttons on the hi-fi, engaging with the equipment to create a tangible artifact. Unlike a playlist, tapes were material, present in the landscape. It made sense that something so meaningful took up room in the world.