Sometimes, a group of organized and determined customers working together can affect change and make a company see things from their point of view. For North American customers annoyed that SiriusXM abruptly dropped BBC Radio 1, that tactic isn’t working. But hey, at least the outcry got SiriusXM to put BBC Radio 1 back on the PC streaming lineup. Which would be meaningful if the BBC didn’t already provide free streaming access to the station.

Many annoyed subscribers have written to us about this issue. Reader and BBC fan Pete writes:

Recently, Sirius XM stopped carrying the British radio station BBC Radio 1 without any warning or notice to subscribers. Unfortunately they didn’t count on the customer backlash.

For over a week the Sirius XM Facebook page has been inundated with complaints from subscribers, the Facebook group “Bring Back BBC Radio 1 to North American Sirius/XM Radio” has had over 3700 likes in a week and (figuring money talks) over $647 has been donated to Unicef in protest.

Now given that all of this is being done in a very well organized fashion we can see some patterns. And one of those patterns is form emails. All of the complaints to Sirius’ “Contact us” form on their web page has resulted in exactly the same response, the only difference being the name of the “person” who responsed. The same has occurred to emails sent directly to Gary Schoenwetter, Sirius’s Senior Director of music programming. All responses sent out to customers from him have been form emails.

Sirius’ response ? After a week with no response at all they brought back BBC Radio 1… to their streaming service.

A press release was sent out today by Sirius proclaiming how the return of BBC Radio 1 to streaming-only was such a wonderful thing. Shame the press release didn’t let the less clued-in folks that they can easily get it without paying anyone a penny.

Get BBC Radio 1 Back on Sirius XM [Facebook]
Radio 1 [BBC]

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