On August 26, 2002, XM Satellite Radio management responded to subscriber demand by launching several new music channels … including The Village, playing folk music … and SUNNY — now called Escape — the “Beautiful Music”/Easy Listening heritage radio format today heard on SiriusXM Channel 69.
When word came down at the beginning of July 2002 regarding these additions … here’s how I tell it in my RADIO … My Love, My Passion memoir:
Meanwhile, in the middle of 2002 … it was announced that although Easy Listening was not part of the original XM channel lineup, subscriber demand was such that an Easy Listening channel was to be included with other genres when the channel lineup was realigned in August of 2002, carrying the name of SUNNY.
I quickly discovered that Lee Abrams and the rest of management really didn’t recognize what kind of musical sound was being asked for, so it was time for me to become an advocate for what the subscribers really wanted; considering that the “father of the format” was already on staff, they had no choice but to place the channel under my auspices.
It wasn’t that I really needed something more to do. However, I was confidently able to tell them that if they began airing the format they had in mind, to be provided by an outside source I’ll discuss in a moment, the company would be losing two ways: (1) we’d not be delivering the product being requested, and (2) valuable bandwidth (which was already in scarce supply) would be eaten up by a format which wasn’t necessarily desired.
Since the genre had disappeared a decade or more earlier from terrestrial radio (as we called it at XM), it was easy to assume that few people still had an interest in this kind of musical programming — which is why it wasn’t included when the service was launched the year before. As music lovers were signing up for this new service which they could hear most anywhere across the nation based on the promise of “69 channels of commercial-free music,” it was easy to assume that what you were interested in had to be among those 69 channels. When it wasn’t, it was time to let the provider know, as you were paying them good money each month.
An easy way to dispense with a format which was of no interest to those in charge was to pass it off to Clear Channel Broadcasting (now iHeart), who owned five of XM’s channels and had already given Channel 24 the name SUNNY, for what was to be their interpretation of Easy Listening — which I presume would have been a soft Adult Contemporary.
Sitting just above Lee Abrams in the hierarchy was a gentleman named Steve who was responsible for managing the administrative and financial aspects of the programming and operations side of the organization. Fortunately, he understood were I was coming from and went to work on getting Clear Channel to allow us to control the channel’s programming. (It also happened that his all-time favorite musical artist was German bandleader Bert Kaempfert, whose recordings have been prominent in our playlists from the earliest days right through to the present.)
By the time this was resolved, we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. This was not a huge problem, just labor … as I knew exactly what needed to be done and how to do it, plus many of the tracks needed to populate the basic library resided on CD’s in my basement as part of my personal collection.
When our format launched, it did not take long for existing listeners to flock to it. From its earliest days, XM had employed an outside research firm to survey its subscribers to determine what channels were being listened to … and SUNNY almost immediately placed among the top dozen of most-listened-to channels! For the next couple of years, things rolled along quite smoothly until, I believe, early 2005, when Clear Channel recognized the growing XM subscriber count and said, “voila, we can sell commercials and make money!” Of course, this was in conflict with XM’s promise of “69 commercial-free music channels,” of which SUNNY was counted as one.
It took a few weeks to arrange, but as soon as a new name could be chosen … we moved to a new channel with our new name — I believe it was Channel 78 initially. One challenge was listeners finding our new channel location, as Clear Channel forbade us from announcing the channel move on Channel 24 itself … one day we simply were gone!
18 Years Later…
One way or another, they did! Now, 18 years later, the format as heard on satellite radio still has an extremely large devoted listenership … in spite of suffering through this challenge along with the one in 2015, when SiriusXM management chose to delete the format entirely. Never anticipating such a strong negative reaction from such a body of subscribers — in spite of attempts to pacify them by trying to pass off another genre’s channel as a satisfactory alternative, which in no way made any sense … the Elvis channel would even had been better — Escape was immediately restored to its old channel location.
Sadly, two other genre’s channels — folk music’s The Village and the light-classics SiriusXM Pops — were not able to mount a strong enough outcry. They remain as part of the OnLine service, but really deserve to be in the satellite lineup.
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Coming up in the weeks ahead … a super rail photo story and more on the history of satellite radio!
P. S. – As this was about to be published, I realized that part of this Musings more or less repeats some of what I shared here a year ago at this time … my apologies!
On various Facebook radio pages I see comments lamenting that "corporate" radio has replaced local personalities with generic voice tracking. The posters see that as the reason listeners are abandoning the medium. When I ask my communications students how important personalities / announcers are to them, they universally tell me they want to hear music, and talk is a turnoff. What are your thoughts?
John, that’s not an easy question – I think demographics are a factor … the younger the person, the less interested they are in learning or should we say “being enlightened.” Not knowing how old your students are, makes it more difficult to pronounce a judgement. The younger the person, the less they care about most everything except that which is high on their minds … you agree? Hence, unless it were their favorite musical personality talking, give them music they like and don’t bother them with any distractions. That’s my “off the top of my head” re-action.
Remember, talk includes COMMERCIALS. Why tolerate 6 minute blocks of spots when your favorite tunes are so readily available in other forms? Internet radio, Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, and songs stored on a portable device all can cut to the chase for music without commercials for the most part or at all. How radio can survive this onslaught leaves me perplexed.
This is what I hear from my students. Commercials are noise. And often irrelevant to them.
You can opt out of commercials on YouTube for a small fee. Or skip them after a few seconds. And students pay an introductory low fee—I believe Spotify is only $5 a month—and they are hooked for life.
The only role I can see for talk along with music are the traditional service elements: traffic, weather, news, maybe important sports scores. But that costs money and the money is not there.
These are communications students in their late teens to early 20s. I believe they don't care about anything but the music.
The idea of a dj / host / personality is largely foreign to them. In earlier times, we as radio listeners related to air personalities vicariously. They were a connection to the rest of the world, if only a one-way link. Nowadays, with social media, we can relate to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Ergo, the date of the celebrity dj, or even the local dj, is likely over.