Dave's Top Eight

1. Jerry Reed...Revisited by Darrell Toney (reviewed 6/07) (5 Stars)
2. Sounds Like Sunday by Janet Paschal (reviewed 5/07) (5 Stars)
3. True To The Call by Kingdom Heirs (reviewed 3/07) (4 1/2 Stars)
4. Revival by Gold City (reviewed 10/06) (4 1/2 Stars)
5. Get Away Jordan by Ernie Haase & Signature Sound (reviewed 2/07) (4 1/2 Stars)
6. Breakin' Chains by Three Bridges (reviewed 5/07) (4 1/2 Stars)
7. Big Sky by The Isaacs (reviewed 4/07)
8. Skywriting by Mercy's Well (reviewed 7/07)

Click title to purchase at CBD.com...click artist name to read Dave's Review. A CD will automatically fall out of the Top Eight after twelve months if no CD surpasses it before then.

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February 23, 2007

Marlin Taylor And DBM Discuss The XM/Sirius Merger

After reading what Marlin Taylor of XM's enLighten Southern Gospel channel had posted about the XM/Sirius merger on enLighten's website, I posed a couple of questions to him directly. Taylor was gracious enough to respond promptly. You can read the full statement that prompted my questions HERE.

DBM: A couple of your statements seemed to contradict each other. At one point you mention that customers might need new receivers in order to get the full combined services of both XM and Sirius. At another point you mention XM and Sirius merging their channel lineups.

Will XM and Sirius merge their channel lineup, and if so, why would a new receiver be necessary?

Marlin Taylor: I’ll attempt to answer this without getting too technical or overly detailed. There are two limiting factors right off in any combining of the two companies’ systems: First, they operate with two very different transmission systems, which complicates the design of a receiver which can pick up both, let alone having current radios for either service receive the other’s programming. Secondly, both systems are max’d out, so they cannot be expanded to include channels from the other company’s lineup.

For instance, for the merged company to deliver Sirius’ NFL broadcasts, something would need to be bumped, the same would be the case if enLighten were to be made available to Sirius subscribers. This limited availability of “bandwidth” allocated to each company by the FCC is what caused so much time to pass before Southern Gospel was added to XM’s satellite lineup – another format had to bumped.

What the press release was trying to say was that existing receivers would not be made obsolete … they still will be able to receive the channels which their present service continues to deliver. At some point, when the companies’ decide to merge their lineup – meaning that where programming is presently duplicated by both parties … mostly in the Country and rock arenas and some news/talk channels like Fox News, CNN (examples only, nothing been determined) … is eliminated, a person’s favorite channel may land on the “other side” of the combined service.

DBM: You quoted some statistics regarding the popularity of enLighten vs. other XM channels, the number of enLighten listeners, the amount of time a listener tunes in vs. switching channels, etc. These stats all sounded very encouraging in terms of enLighten surviving the merger, but I wonder how you arrived at those stats. How does XM know, for example, that Customer A listens to enLighten for two hours before switching over to Laugh USA for 30 minutes while Customer B never takes his radio off of enLighten?

Marlin Taylor: These are legitimate figures provided to XM management by two different research organizations, one being Arbitron, which is the accepted audience ratings service for all of American radio. These two companies survey the XM body of subscribers to determine what they are listening to. The first Arbitron survey following enLighten’s arrival on the satellite service on April 18th came in late June. This report told us that the enLighten audience was geared up and waiting for it, as it showed the channel as already being in the top 20% of XM’s most-listened-to channels … this just 60 days following launch. The latest Arbitron survey showed only a small increase in audience size, but confirmed that the June numbers were not a fluke … and all of this is confirmed by data from the other research company, whose name I do not know.

A key factor is that XM management has now proclaimed enLighten to be a great success story.

One further point …I am amazed at the number of groups who have reported being told numerous times that their recordings have been heard on enLighten and are seeing increased CD sales due to this exposure. Mind you, these are lesser-known groups who’s recordings are only occasionally played. At the NQC, someone told me that “in the five months since enLighten went on the satellite service,” this group (I have no idea who it was) has sold more CD’s than total sales of the previous five years!

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posted by David Bruce Murray @ 10:57:00 PM


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