Might also have something to do with the extra 14 months spent waiting for FCC approval. Of course their actions post merger have done nothing except prompt me to cancel one of my two radios so they are to blame. I hope it will be Chapter 11 and not worse as I do like their service even though it's been going downhill.

@Jeremy Wentworth: Not to mention the fact that they swore during the anti-trust hearings leading up to their merger that they would not raise rates for what was it, 3 years? So instead, they raised "Fees". They may see it as a loophole, but consumers aren't as stupid as they seem to think we are. I wouldn't buy one of their products now even if it meant I'd have to listen to Howard Stern on normal radio again.

I hope they don't go away, though. I'm really liking XM even if it is unnecessary spending.

Someone will buy it and make money off of it.. Sirius got too big for its britches.

Its a good product if done right and for the right price. I would pay $49 per year for it, but not $15 per month..

Wow, They consoladate companies,raise our rates, then go under. Thanks Xm-Not-so sirius.

But these companies have been so well run... I'm completely shocked by this!

I too hope that they are able to fix their issues - while I don't care for the way they do business, nor the way they treat their customers, I still use my service extensively.

Company isn't going away - the only people who are actually going to be affected by this are the shareholders and the bondholders.

Shocking. Pay-for satellite radio that is not any better than free radio is going under. We had this at work it had over a hundred channels and still nothing to listen to. Plus it was incredibly repetitive on most stations. I would hear a good majority of songs twice in a six hour period.

Yeah, I'm one of those stockholders that gets the free anal expansion.

I actually saw someone on orbitcast mention that even if echostar takes them over there'll be more scrutiny over the merger. That should be enough to kill yet another company.

sucks for people who bought lifetime subscriptions.

I have had Sirius from almost the start. My wife and I have it in each of our cars. I travel frequently into areas with little or no radio coverage, and it makes travel much better. That said, I have never listened to Howard Stern, and the deal with him was too much money for too little return. The FCC and Congress worrying about whether it would be a monopoly if they merged helped to exacerbate the company's woes. The credit crunch effectively is killing them. I hope they survive they shakeout, but to woo younger listeners, they need to be more creative. Plus, why would a young hipster get Sirius when they can plug the ipod into the car's stereo system?

I am so glad I dumped them a few months back. They had a lot of problems in their billing dept. I am also glad I got back the money they tried to screw me out of. Thank god for charge back.

Oh damn. I listen to Sirius's blues channel all the time via our satellite TV connection (DirecTV). And their all-Christmas classical station at the appropriate season. I would hate to lose these....

@thebluepill:

The problem is probably all the stupid contracts with baseball, nascar, shock jocks, etc.

If they had just stuck to music, their costs would probably be 1/10 lower.

I tell ya, these sports leagues are going to price themselves right out of a job one of these days.

I just got the "immediate action required" email from XM last week about the rates of my multiple radio account going up (unless I sign up for some long-term contract). I'm not quite sure how I'm going to play it (either drop a radio or close out the account altogether), but I figured I'd use this news as a little more leverage.

@rickinsthelens: The ipod doesn't help you much if you need to travel and want to listen to one of the sports games in the car on the way. Some of the content they have isn't bad, I happen to like Howard Stern, as one overpaid example. It was fun listening to the Radio classics channel on an 8 hour trip with the family, and last time I made a long drive I had CNN to keep me company while the rest of the family slept.

This story explains an e-mail that I received called "Immediate Action Required Regarding Your XM Service," which said that I needed to renew my service by March 10th or I would now have to pay 2.99 per month to listen online.

i love my satellite radio! its all i listen pretty much, no commercials and an excellent selection of what you want to hear!

@Saboth: I don't know how many subscriptions NASCAR brings in - I can't imagine that being a money maker. But I do know that I'll cancel if they quit broadcasting MLB.

Is that why their stock went to .052 cents today? I knew something was up when they went down over 50% in value. Somehow I get the feeling I will never get my break-even price of $1.91.

:-(

@nataku83: I am one of those, but actually stopped listening to it a year ago. Its pretty much garbage IMO. I got it for Stern, and my XC driving vacation, but after 3 months of it I was done forever.

I listen to Pandora or Slacker on my iphone for free (though my wife just bought the upgraded slacker radio for $40 for the year). I can see how XM/Sirius would have trouble competing with these companies.

I'm not surprised. The merger was just an excuse to keep all the higly paid executives while decimating any decent content either company had. There used to be 4 very good electronic music stations on Sirius. I loved them dearly. Then the merger happened and now I have 2 electronic music stations. One that plays bad house music, and one that plays bad house remixes of bad top 40 music. the local FM electronic music station has far more variety then Sirius XM does now.

And they wonder why they're hemorrhaging subscribers. You just got rid of the reasons everyone paid for it in the first place. To get music we CANT hear on the radio.

Am I the only person that thinks satelite radio sounds like bad MP3 downloads? The music sounds like it is coming out of a tin can.

I've listened to it in a Focus, Mazdaspeed3 (with the bose system, and jeep cherkoee and it all sounds like crap... FM sounded fine so it wasn't the stereo itself.

I would never pay for music quality like that.

i love sirius...have had it for 3 years...and really hope they dont go out - and anyone who DOESNT have it, really doesnt understand how nice it is to have - is it a necessity? no...and if I were to be laid off - i would cancel in a heartbeat cause it is an extra...but having commercial free, clear music that is consistent...worth every penny

the cause of this fiasco is that they overspent to compete with each other. now that they've merged, all of that money was a complete waste. MLB might be worth $100 mil (or whatever it was) if it attracts a customer to one vs the other, but now that they're one company they probably could've gotten away with paying 1/10 of that. both companies have been poorly run for a long time.

They killed Fred*, and now they're dying. Serves 'em right.

* "Fred" was XM channel 44, "the history of alternative music", approximately a billion and a half times better than the Sirius channel "First Wave" with it's talky meat DJs and dinky little playlist.

@Jeremy Wentworth: Dito. Canceled because of the the reduction (!) in stations in certain genres and the introduction of crappy talk radio on popular stations in the morning. I'm paying for music, not to listen to someone talk about crap I don't care about.

My renewal was coming up and I called to cancel, only to be given a $77 rate for the year (1/2 price). I took it, for < $7 a month why not. I listen mostly to Ron and Fez and baseball, and I won't miss their crappy online stream. Slacker fills in the rest of my music entertainment needs, online streaming for FREE and in much better sound and content quality.

I am not shocked; as a long-term XM subscriber I was expecting better out of the merge... a combination of the best of both worlds, not 'let's eliminate or dumb down all of the XM stations and give people several channels that play only one act's music all day!'

XM was sometimes criticized (mostly by people who chose to subscribe to Sirius instead) for the bulk of their music selections being "too obscure," but if all I wanted to hear was music I already own or could hear all the time on terrestrial radio, I would just listen to my iPod or the radio in my car.

There seems to have recently been *some* small recognition on Sirius' part that Maybe They Screwed Up via some programming changes (specifically on Area) that probably don't mean much to Sirius listeners but XM subscribers have certainly noticed, with the return of at least one of the programs that was lost when they jettisoned The System.

That's a nice first step, but the powers that be at SiriusXM really need to take another long look at what havoc they've wreaked on their lineup and fix it, stat.

I have a theory- these companies have been trying to make broadcast radio crappy on purpose (how else do you explain how BAD most stations are) to force people into pay radio. Now I have to laugh.

I may be dropping them as well. I received the same email about how they want to charge 2.99 more per month if i want to continue to listen online. I really don't care about the online stream being of higher quality, it was a nice perk to listen online while at work. With higher quality comes more bandwidth that I'm sure my company would gripe about. They're going downhill, time to switch to free online alternatives.

I canceled because they dumped a lot of stations and I can get Big Ten football and basketball cheaper through Yahoo! Sports and it is cheaper to get NFL and MLB video and run them through my laptop onto my TV.

@Principia: "but if all I wanted to hear was music I already own or could hear all the time on terrestrial radio, I would just listen to my iPod or the radio in my car."

OMG thank you!! I constantly see the iPod presented as a reason why satellite radio is not needed, and I always think "really? do you have an MP3 (or whatever) of every song you ever might want to hear?" That's what used to be good about the channels I listened to on XM - the chance to hear something I'd never heard before, or hadn't heard in a long long time.

I miss Fred on 44 on XM. They replaced it with what they call 1st Wave. Instead of old, cutting edge stuff you rarely hear they play the stuff that went main stream and became 80's pop. Don't get me started on them replacing UPOP with BBC1. Yuck. I too canceled.

I do hope they go bankrupt and something good can come from the ashes. Might reconsider then.

And yea. The music quality is awful anymore. When I first got XM some years back it sounded pretty close to CD quality. Not quite, but close.

@Jeremy Wentworth: Well, when they were issued licenses, they were told that they absolutely could not merge under any conditions. So they should have anticipated a long merger process when they decided to merge anyway.

Might have helped if they kept the good stations. After the merger i canceled after a few weeks. They took my favorite stations and turned them into crap.

@hipersons: Agreed. Good riddance.

Maybe this is why they keep emailing me to pay up on the bill? That shouldn't exist. Because I canceled my service.

See you in hell, Sirius XM.

Long live iPhone + Pandora.

@menty666: Kudos for making your family withstand 8 hours of "Radio Classics".

I would have killed my parents.

@MattO: Was until that merger.

@larrymac808: I was probably familiar with 2 - 3 songs for every 10 I heard on Fred when I first started listening to it 4 years ago. At the end of its run, I was up to 4 - 5 songs.

With First Wave, and "Cool English Guy" (as I call the annoying DJ, except I use a derogatory term in place of "cool"), I'm probably up to 8 - 9 for every 10 songs.

I miss the variety a lot. Fred was a major source of "new" music for me until it went way.

This is why I haven't bought in to satellite radio. When it first came out I looked at the head units and thought, "wow, this is all proprietary. If these companies go under I'll be stuck with a $400 doorstop."

Hmm, ipod/Blackberry/iphone that can play your own chosen music, no commmercial breaks, without a monthly fee vs $13 a month for recycled playlists.

Not much of a surprise that theyre going under in this belt-tightening period.I will say in XM-Sirius' defense that it was a good way to discover new music occasionally, but at $13 a month id rather just spend an hour on iTunes randomly finding music.

Had XM/Sirius found a way to to get good sattelite signal within buildings an iPod alliance with Apple would rock-literally.Too bad.

I absolutely loved my XM subscription before they merged. They wooed this younger listener over with stations like Fungus 53, Fred, Lucy, Liquid Metal and XM Comedy. I always found a station with something to listen to.

Now that they've been replaced all those stations the with terrible Sirius replacements I'm going to be end my subscription in a couple of months, once my contract is up.

I find myself listening to my Pandora stations on my iPhone far more than I listen to XM/Sirius.

@Jeremy Wentworth: So, lickity-split fast-track FCC approval would have helped them raise their prices faster, drop decent stations quicker and merge more seamlessly?
Yay?

Isn't there some way we can blame the Fairness Doctrine on this mess? Guys? GUYS?!

@GothamGal: I got one of those emails -- two weeks after I canceled my service. I know my radios aren't receiving service, and I can only hope they don't try charging me for this month.

@menty666: And foolish people keep insisting that patricide is a crime...

I got Sirius when Howard left FM. As of now, I have not listened to him continuously in at least a year.

I have one Sportster-R at work (with b-box) because radio reception is horrible. I have a Sirius tuner connected to my Alpine head unit.

I do not want to have to pay $3 extra a month for the one extra radio I have.

I'd be sad if they went belly up and ceased to exist, but then again, I am not sure I'd miss them as I thought I would...