Capricorne
2008-04-06 14:28:17 UTC
A few days ago, we were talking about dedicated channels to one artist.
The Washington Post has a paper on it today:
Short Waves of Activity in the Satellite Universe
By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; M04
Just as the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal became the ultimate water-cooler
conversation topic -- if only for a few days -- Sirius Satellite Radio
launched Client 9 Radio, a 24/7 all-Spitzer channel, but just for a few
days.
And when the new baseball season got underway last week, Sirius's
competitor and possible future partner, XM Satellite Radio, offered
Play Ball!, a new channel featuring wall-to-wall baseball songs,
readings and dramas. Three days after the channel launched, it ceased
to exist.
Sirius calls its instant, saturation formats "pop-up channels." XM
calls them "microchannels." By any name, they are a reflection of a
changed entertainment and information culture, a recognition that the
American audience is shifting from loyalty toward permanent formats to
sudden plunges into topics and trends that flash onto the collective
consciousness and then flit away as quickly as they arrived.
The two pay satellite companies last month won Justice Department
approval for their proposed merger; the FCC has yet to rule on the
plan.
"The Spitzer story was so in the zeitgeist of the country for a
minute," says Scott Greenstein, president of entertainment and sports
at Sirius in New York. "We try to be the ultimate aggregator."
"There is a massive appetite for what's hot at the moment," says Eric
Logan, XM's executive vice president for programming. "We're trying to
reflect the mood of current culture in a way nobody else can. Right
now, the core appetite is for the presidential campaign, and we have
Fox and CNN channels that cover that, but we wondered if we could take
them deeper."
So XM created POTUS '08 (using the acronym for president of the United
States), an all-presidential politics channel that launched last
September and will continue through this fall's election -- and
possibly beyond, Logan says.
But although Client 9 Radio and POTUS grabbed more headlines than most
pop-up channels, the bulk of the short-term, saturation channels that
Sirius and XM have created have been musical offerings, not talk.
"When you look back, if you're north of 30 or 35, we bought records or
went to a concert and it would move you, and for the next few days, you
really mainly wanted to listen to that artist," Greenstein says.
So Sirius has enlisted musicians such as Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow and
Jay-Z to "take over" channels for several days at a time, playing and
talking about their music. And the satellite provider has devoted
channels to one artist for weeks or even months -- E Street Radio plays
Bruce Springsteen and members of his band, and Rolling Stones Radio,
which is running now through April 15, was timed to coincide with the
release of Martin Scorsese's documentary about the band, "Shine a
Light."
Sirius is also running Radio R.E.M. through today, coinciding with a
new album and featuring band members introducing their own music and
other tunes they like.
"People don't want to constantly aggregate and update an iPod,"
Greenstein says. "We're creating channels that aren't just jukeboxes,
but are produced artistically, with interviews, live performances and
archived material."
The music pop-up channels are produced with the permission and
cooperation of the artists, and "we work with the artist and their
management about how long they feel they want the channel to be up,"
Greenstein says.
Neither Sirius nor XM will release numbers showing the audience size
for the microchannels, but XM's Logan says that the more successful
short-term formats match and even exceed the audience for some of the
company's most popular regular channels.
Some of XM's most successful microstations have been built around
holidays, such as a three-day Saint Patrick's Day celebration of Irish
music called XM Green, a Labor Day blowout of songs about cars and
driving called Car-B-Q, and a Halloween channel called Igor that
blended scary sound effects with songs such as "Monster Mash" and
spoken-word ghost stories. XM last year added a Radio Hanukkah channel
that had only the most limited of audiences -- and a painfully limited
playlist -- but certainly won points for novelty.
XM just finished a month-long Michael Jackson channel called Thriller
and this week started Strait Country, an all-George Strait service that
will run through May.
Sirius ran its Strait Up channel back in 2006, and of course the rival
services each claim to be the inventor of short-term formats. Sirius
started out with intensive music channels and has branched into a Bing
Crosby Christmas Radio channel and one that played only the radio
dramas written by Oscar-winning movie team of Joel and Ethan Coen.
XM got into microchannels three years ago, when a hurricane took out
power in southwestern Florida and Logan called the radio station he
formerly worked at, only to find that the station was off the air,
muted by the power outage.
"It hit me that we have two transmitters in space," Logan says, so the
company launched Red Cross Radio, which both then and in the aftermath
of the Katrina disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi enabled volunteers
on the ground to communicate with one another and plot logistics even
when power and cellphones were out.
But the short-term format idea really has its roots in old-fashioned
terrestrial radio, in the AM Top 40 stations of the 1950s and '60s that
regularly created themed weekends featuring extra helpings of girl
bands, Motown or a single artist.
The satellite services say that adapting that model helps keep
subscribers feeling that they are paying for something exciting and
unpredictable. But microchannels are also a new way to package
entertainment and information for a society that consumes popular
culture in short but intense bursts -- from espresso shots to text
messages to viral videos, and now to radio formats that delve deeply
into a single artist and vanish before some of us even knew they
existed.
Post a Comment
mallemployee wrote:
The REM and the Rolling Stones stations have kidnapped two of my
favorite Sirius channels (Spectrum and Shuffle). There must be unused
channels somewhere else in the lineup that can be used for these short
term take-overs.
The Washington Post has a paper on it today:
Short Waves of Activity in the Satellite Universe
By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; M04
Just as the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal became the ultimate water-cooler
conversation topic -- if only for a few days -- Sirius Satellite Radio
launched Client 9 Radio, a 24/7 all-Spitzer channel, but just for a few
days.
And when the new baseball season got underway last week, Sirius's
competitor and possible future partner, XM Satellite Radio, offered
Play Ball!, a new channel featuring wall-to-wall baseball songs,
readings and dramas. Three days after the channel launched, it ceased
to exist.
Sirius calls its instant, saturation formats "pop-up channels." XM
calls them "microchannels." By any name, they are a reflection of a
changed entertainment and information culture, a recognition that the
American audience is shifting from loyalty toward permanent formats to
sudden plunges into topics and trends that flash onto the collective
consciousness and then flit away as quickly as they arrived.
The two pay satellite companies last month won Justice Department
approval for their proposed merger; the FCC has yet to rule on the
plan.
"The Spitzer story was so in the zeitgeist of the country for a
minute," says Scott Greenstein, president of entertainment and sports
at Sirius in New York. "We try to be the ultimate aggregator."
"There is a massive appetite for what's hot at the moment," says Eric
Logan, XM's executive vice president for programming. "We're trying to
reflect the mood of current culture in a way nobody else can. Right
now, the core appetite is for the presidential campaign, and we have
Fox and CNN channels that cover that, but we wondered if we could take
them deeper."
So XM created POTUS '08 (using the acronym for president of the United
States), an all-presidential politics channel that launched last
September and will continue through this fall's election -- and
possibly beyond, Logan says.
But although Client 9 Radio and POTUS grabbed more headlines than most
pop-up channels, the bulk of the short-term, saturation channels that
Sirius and XM have created have been musical offerings, not talk.
"When you look back, if you're north of 30 or 35, we bought records or
went to a concert and it would move you, and for the next few days, you
really mainly wanted to listen to that artist," Greenstein says.
So Sirius has enlisted musicians such as Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow and
Jay-Z to "take over" channels for several days at a time, playing and
talking about their music. And the satellite provider has devoted
channels to one artist for weeks or even months -- E Street Radio plays
Bruce Springsteen and members of his band, and Rolling Stones Radio,
which is running now through April 15, was timed to coincide with the
release of Martin Scorsese's documentary about the band, "Shine a
Light."
Sirius is also running Radio R.E.M. through today, coinciding with a
new album and featuring band members introducing their own music and
other tunes they like.
"People don't want to constantly aggregate and update an iPod,"
Greenstein says. "We're creating channels that aren't just jukeboxes,
but are produced artistically, with interviews, live performances and
archived material."
The music pop-up channels are produced with the permission and
cooperation of the artists, and "we work with the artist and their
management about how long they feel they want the channel to be up,"
Greenstein says.
Neither Sirius nor XM will release numbers showing the audience size
for the microchannels, but XM's Logan says that the more successful
short-term formats match and even exceed the audience for some of the
company's most popular regular channels.
Some of XM's most successful microstations have been built around
holidays, such as a three-day Saint Patrick's Day celebration of Irish
music called XM Green, a Labor Day blowout of songs about cars and
driving called Car-B-Q, and a Halloween channel called Igor that
blended scary sound effects with songs such as "Monster Mash" and
spoken-word ghost stories. XM last year added a Radio Hanukkah channel
that had only the most limited of audiences -- and a painfully limited
playlist -- but certainly won points for novelty.
XM just finished a month-long Michael Jackson channel called Thriller
and this week started Strait Country, an all-George Strait service that
will run through May.
Sirius ran its Strait Up channel back in 2006, and of course the rival
services each claim to be the inventor of short-term formats. Sirius
started out with intensive music channels and has branched into a Bing
Crosby Christmas Radio channel and one that played only the radio
dramas written by Oscar-winning movie team of Joel and Ethan Coen.
XM got into microchannels three years ago, when a hurricane took out
power in southwestern Florida and Logan called the radio station he
formerly worked at, only to find that the station was off the air,
muted by the power outage.
"It hit me that we have two transmitters in space," Logan says, so the
company launched Red Cross Radio, which both then and in the aftermath
of the Katrina disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi enabled volunteers
on the ground to communicate with one another and plot logistics even
when power and cellphones were out.
But the short-term format idea really has its roots in old-fashioned
terrestrial radio, in the AM Top 40 stations of the 1950s and '60s that
regularly created themed weekends featuring extra helpings of girl
bands, Motown or a single artist.
The satellite services say that adapting that model helps keep
subscribers feeling that they are paying for something exciting and
unpredictable. But microchannels are also a new way to package
entertainment and information for a society that consumes popular
culture in short but intense bursts -- from espresso shots to text
messages to viral videos, and now to radio formats that delve deeply
into a single artist and vanish before some of us even knew they
existed.
Post a Comment
mallemployee wrote:
The REM and the Rolling Stones stations have kidnapped two of my
favorite Sirius channels (Spectrum and Shuffle). There must be unused
channels somewhere else in the lineup that can be used for these short
term take-overs.