ClearChannel, I Salute You!!

I salute you for sucking so severely, I'm amazed that physical properties of the universe have not caused you to implode on yourself. I must really have been sleeping in my Physics lectures in college, because I thought sucking that much would create a vacuum that nothing could escape.

Where does the hatred for the c-squared come from? Years of annoyance actually.

1. Buying up all cool local radio stations and turning them into corporate schlock playing whatever artists had enough payola to make it happen.
2. Censoring songs because you know what the American public should be allowed to hear. Similar to only playing songs we should hear as in #1. Whether true or not, creating a list of songs that were no longer kosher to be played after 9/11.
3. Now, the best of all, forcing commercials down the throat of XM, a service that has boldly stuck to the subscription vs. ad-sponsored format on music channels until now.

Some background information on this. ClearChannel was one of the backers of the fledgling XM satellite radio company as it was trying to get off the ground. Likely to make sure that if it started cutting into their terrestrial schlock profits, they could find a way to either capitalize or kill it. It appears they are aiming for the latter. XM has fought it as much as possible, but they are forced to allow ClearChannel to have 4 (or 5 depending on where you read) channels where they can completely control the programming, including sticking commercials on there.

I hate commercials. I can't stress that enough. That is probably the single biggest selling point of XM for me. This is just plain evil. The other portion of XM that I really like is the artist info, similar to RDS. The ClearChannel channels (at least as of today) do not have this information either. Boom, you've pretty much just killed everything I like about XM.

Now, the good news at least is that XM is doing as much as possible to minimize this evil. They have created 4 new channels that are essentially exactly the same programming that formerly was on the ClearChannel channels. These will be commercial-free. The ClearChannel channels now carry a nice little "cm" after them to indicate commercials, much like an "xl" signifies explicit language. In the published channel guide, these channels are now grouped over with talk radio channels as well.

So, all I am really wanting now is a way to delete channels from my XM dial, similar to my TV set. I could delete some entire groupings/genres that I care nothing about, one of them being the ClearChannel stations.

SWEET, SWEET, SWEET! I just found out that I can block them from my entire subscription. I'm doing this as soon as I get home tonight. Also, until I tried to find the links for this post, I had no idea how many sites were dedicated to discussing how ClearChannel sucks. Rock On.