'60s, 70s, 80s, etc.

MRBIboredop said:

When Mom is in the car, the 40's channel comes on.

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I was just about to mention the earliest and least commercial of the decades channels.
The forties on four became forties junction when they moved it to channel seventy-three a few months ago.
I did not like their doing that,
but they made it easier for those with limited cerebral cortices to stumble across Pitbull's Globalization.
Really though, the folks who grew up listening to LaVerne, Maxene, and Patty
are in their eighties and I wonder how much longer the channel will remain.

wadio said:

Now suppose they sliced and diced those 4 decades differently.
For example, Mainstream pop hits, Motown oriented hits, Country oriented hits, Rock oriented hits.

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Many genres already have their dedicated channels:
The decades are now considered mainstream pop, but add Siriusly Sinatra
R & B has Soul Town and The Groove
Country has Willie's Roadhouse, Prime Country, and Y2Kountry
Rock has Classic Vynil and Classic Rewind
also,
Alternative rock has 1st Wave and Lithium
Jazz has Real Jazz and Watercolors
The childrens category has three half-decade channels
for children born around '02, '07, and '12

landtuna said:

People like it because the music sells itself and doesn't have to remind them of an event (such as Swing for WWII for instance).

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What the heck does that mean? That swing needed a war to become popular; otherwise, no one would have liked it? Or that the only people who still like swing today are World War II veterans or WW2 buffs? ALL music from ANY time period will remind some people of events, but most music -- other than the most strident of protest songs and fad-oriented novelty songs -- has some sort of intrinsic musical appeal completely separated from any outside event. Otherwise it doesn't become popular or memorable.

1955-1984 was a 29-year span that ended 33 years ago. Thirty-three years from now -- in 2050 -- I'm sure there'll be people like you complaining about how the "soundalike junk" and "garbage" music of the last 33 years can't compare to the "great" music of 1988-2017. And they'll be wrong, too.

I think it is possible to over think this topic. People obviously like the decade channels, or they would go away. With as many channels as Sirius XM has, it is possible for them to have such channels, and the other channels mentioned in this thread. The original proposal for satellite radio was for a service with thousands of channels. I wish that had happened, there would be even more variety on the service. Don't really remember what happened, but the service got whittled down to just a few hundred channels - of which I seldom use most of them. If there were thousands, I probably would still be on the decade channels. Just in general terms, 60's has more songs that I like, and fewer that I loathe to the point of changing the channel. In a typical commute, I will probably pop over to 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's a few times. Probably over to current hit channels as well like 2 and 11. Sometimes specialty like classic rock channels or the new Beatles channel. But 60's is the one I dwell on most of the time. I am sure my taste is different from other users, but I definitely find the decades useful.

rbrucecarter5 said:

The original proposal for satellite radio was for a service with thousands of channels. I wish that had happened, there would be even more variety on the service. Don't really remember what happened, but the service got whittled down to just a few hundred channels

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Maybe that was the original Sirius proposal -- though why they would think they could cram "thousands" of channels into so little bandwidth would be a miscalculation for the ages -- but I believe that XM's original idea was 35 music channels in full, high-quality stereo, period. Then mission creep set in and more music channels were deemed necessary, along with news, talk and sports. The services -- Sirius, XM and SiriusXM -- have just kept growing and growing until bandwidth has been maxed out and audio quality has become a non-starter. New channels have been added to the satellite service through some technical smoke and mirrors called hierarchical modulation, but the audio quality in the "2.0" channel range is also nothing to brag about, and relatively few subscribers can access those channels anyway as the legacy receivers will not receive the new channels and only a few models currently on sale have the new channels built in.

CTListener said:

What the heck does that mean?

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It means, simply, that not all music needs to couple itself to events to be considered "good". Swing obviously reminds people of a certain age of WWII just as Bebop reminds people of my age of our teen years. But songs/music can be enjoyed by people of any age. A good song is a good song no matter the age of the listener. True, those listeners are probably in a minority compared to the mass audiences preferred by radio stations but there will always be people who appreciate music for its own sake and not because "it was the music we grew up with".

You will also be happy to note that I will be long gone by 2050 so whatever passes for music then will have other critics. My "good" popular music stopped in 1984.

landtuna said:

My "good" popular music stopped in 1984.

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Good music is good music and popular music is popular music!
KING's Second Inversion and WQXR's Q2 Music meet half of those requirements.
(sorry, it is unquick and uneasy to link from this phone)

DavidEduardo said:

The key is which channels drive subscriptions.

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Both services originally embraced eclecticism,
but as their subscriber base grew and became more mainstream,
they followed.

ai4i said:

Both services originally embraced eclecticism,
but as their subscriber base grew and became more mainstream,
they followed.

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Precisely. The number of potential subscribers looking for musical genres not found on commercial radio was always going to be relatively small. So was the number of potential subscribers dissatisfied with "tight, repetitive corporate playlists," which is an "inside baseball" issue totally inconsequential to all but a very few people who are either in radio or obsessed with radio. There are still channels for those early adopters in the form of Bluesville, Met Opera Radio, Real Jazz, Bluegrass Junction, The Loft, The Joint, Deep Tracks, Soul Town and the '40s and '50s channels, and a few more I can't recall off the top of my head. In some places, like New York City, the entire array of rock channels now represents a niche underserved on FM. Other places don't have classical music on radio, even on a noncomm -- Symphony Hall represents an underserved niche in those cities.

But to get to tens of millions of subscriptions, both XM and Sirius had to (a) beef up their talk and sports offerings, especially play-by-play, and (b) program more music channels with songs average folks know and love but without commercials, which just about everyone says they hate. That's meant tightening the playlists on some channels and, inevitably, dropping some of the unique-bordering-on-bizarre channels that XM, especially, launched with. Might there be 100,000 people out there who aren't subscribing because there's no longer a folk music channel on the satellites, or a channel of world music, or Latin American jazz? Sure, but that's all there were, and they all got on board early. No growth potential because the genres weren't growing. To meet Wall Street's expectations, and the expectations of the greatest number of potential subscribers, satellite radio HAD to get more focused and mainstream. Lee Abrams saw the writing on the wall and quit, embarking on a foolhardy and ludicrously executed attempt to reinvent the newspaper. What's left are seasoned radio professionals who know what has worked and what is likely to work in the future. So far, the numbers show they're on the right track, despite the disappointment and anger of the minority.