There’s no Escape-ing … 20 years!

This Easy Listening/Beautiful Music genre’s channel was birthed on XM Satellite Radio 20 years ago this week, in the last week of August 2002. This occurred just 11 months after the launch of satellite radio serving North America and came about not out of a desire by XM management to offer this genre of music … just the opposite, the subscriber requests and demand were so great that management could no longer ignore them.

However, management sought to off-load this undesired format onto terrestrial radio broadcaster Clear Channel Radio, which controlled several XM channels by making a financial investment into the Company. The involvement led to the channel initially being named SUNNY. I’ve lost track of the timing, but within a couple of years, XM had gained sufficient subscribers that Clear Channel saw an opportunity to benefit from adding commercials to the five or so channels which they controlled, including the one occupied by SUNNY.

This action, of course, angered listeners and violated the XM promise of offering 69 “commercial-free” music channels. Hastily, management made room in the satellite schedule to add another channel that would carry the name Escape and to which the existing programming on SUNNY would move.

Three items to note here: Early on, XM employed an outside research firm to survey subscribers to determine what channels subscribers were listening to — it was discovered that the format management didn’t want had quickly attracted one of the top dozen largest audiences. One kink in the move was that the Clear Channel folks stipulated that we could not announce the channel change on SUNNY. Thirdly, I find it interesting how the mind can play tricks on what the individual senses. Soon after the move and listeners found us, I began to receive emails complaining that the music being heard on Escape was not the same as that they had loved on SUNNY. There was absolutely no change in the musical content or play formula; my only role in the move was to replace the channel IDs with the new name and channel number — the technicians in master control handled the rest.

Through the next decade, as far as Escape was concerned … things rolled along quite smoothly, although there were a couple of weekends where management “borrowed” our channel space for a special related to another genre that was important to them, despite the irritation they thrust upon tens of thousands of devoted Escape listeners. Even the merger of the two companies in 2008 did nothing to disturb the Escape programming flow, except that from the merger point on, our programming was heard on the Sirius system as well.

However, the calendar year of 2015 would prove to be quite momentous. Not too far into the year, my mind began to debate a personal decision … come late August, I would turn the big 8-0 … was it time to retire? Back at the time of the merger, the 1940s/Savoy Express channel was taken over by Bob Moke, the channel’s music director, who was running it anyway. In 2013, after a tumultuous two years, I let go of enLighten. First, its huge listener base fought off a planned removal of the genre from the satellite lineup in May 2011. Then, after spending 18 months on a temporary channel — next to the Elvis channel, which wasn’t bad — our Southern Gospel channel was reunited with the other two Christian music channels at Channel 65. I was now down to managing only the Escape channel. Yet, with my total focus on this one genre, I managed to round up quite a number of recordings and arrangements of songs that made good additions to the library, many coming from LPs as they’d never been reissued on CD.

In April of 2015, we received via Escape Email this copy of a letter a gentleman named Harry had written to the President of SiriusXM, lauding the programming heard on Escape. I don’t remember having ever had any previous contact with Harry, and I don’t know what motivated him to write … perhaps a premonition of what was coming down the pike not too many days ahead. I had no sense of what management was planning, nor did Harry express any in the brief exchange I had with him after receiving the letter.

As I shared in my radio career memoir, RADIO … My Love, My Passion:

At the start of August, we were ordered to begin airing a scripted announcement making the audience aware of what was to come within a matter of days. And, about the time Escape was removed from the satellite lineup in mid-August, management held a retirement party for me in the Washington headquarters where I worked — I think this was done to make me feel better about what had happened, plus I think I was the first person to “retire” from the Company, as well as being the oldest employee in age.

At the same time, unbeknownst to me, the listeners were not accepting this loss of their favorite music channel … customer service was on overload with a barrage of both complaints and subscribers simply calling and canceling their accounts — keep in mind, a typical account may carry as many as four or five radios by the time you add in several vehicles along with one or more receivers in the home or office.

Again, turning to what I wrote in my memoir:

I continued to fulfill my obligations to the company through the end of August and, two days after my 80^th birthday departed the premises for the last time.

That, my dear reader, was to be the end of my story, but this proved not quite to be the end, as I did not know what lay ahead, and that which I had predicted in June was obviously on target!

Just two weeks later, exactly a month after Escape was removed from the satellite service (on September 11), an email went out to everyone who had either canceled their radio subscriptions or called Customer Care to complain with this message:

And, not long afterward, this “Victory, Sweet Victory” appeared (where I don’t remember) until I came across it a few days ago in another file of archival stuff; I had completely forgotten its existence.

It is now seven years later, and Escape continues to roll along. Yes, some changes have been made, which a segment of the listenership is unhappy about, but the channel is still pretty much intact. I have no say in what’s played or not played, and I seldom offer, as the present management really doesn’t care to hear from me … although they recently congratulated me for the vast collection of recordings I left behind.

That’s all … Happy 20th Birthday, Escape!

PS: As with everything posted on this page, I love receiving feedback from the readers … which you can easily do via the Contact Marlin form to the right of this article.

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