So I read in an online forum today that Sirius/XM is thinking about adding commercials to their political talk station, POTUS. One of the things I like about POTUS is that it doesn’t have ads every 30 minutes, especially since Sirius/XM seems to only be able to sell male enhancement ads and spots for Christian Mingle. (The two might be related). I have always wondered why God needed to run an ad to get Christians to hook up in the biblical sense, or why he even needs the Internet to accomplish his destiny. I mean, he/she is God, after all. I don’t see God as the point and click type.
I hate advertising more and more each day. And I struggle with the fact that as a Sirius/XM subscriber I still have to listen to commercials. I shouldn’t have to pay to listen to commercials, it just seems backwards to me. Well, actually more irritating than backwards. If I wanted to listen to commercials, I’d listen to terrestrial radio.
I understand that the talk show hosts need to take a break to pee and the like once in a while, but there’s no reason that Sirius/XM can’t just run promos during these periods instead of paid ads. The idea of putting ads on a currently ad-free site makes me wonder if Sirius/XM is going to be around in five years. Could they be going belly up? Maybe instead of renewing I should just use the money to beef up my data plan on my phone and just stream music or talk radio that way. My music or talk on my schedule without the ads.
Now that is something to ponder.
I’ve noticed SiriusXM has been injecting commercials into other channels that previously were commercial free (with the exception of those annoying “you’re listening to this station blah blah blah” bits). I’m not sure how I feel about that either, especially since they just raised their rates.
And now there’s the mess with Pandora talking about limiting listeners to only 40 hours of music per month because of increasing royalty costs. Argh!
And the record companies wonder why people pirate music….