A share of Sirius XM is now selling for $0.41. You could buy a round lot for $41. I would advise against that.
Background: I got an XM receiver about two years ago from Circuit City (remember them?). Let me first tell you the things it did well: gave me more options of radio stations to flip through while driving, with fewer commercials.
Ok, now that I've listed the good things, I can get to the meat of this post. XM advertised "commercial-free music," but what they didn't mention is that only about half of its channels were commercial-free. About half of those were just an iPod in the XM studios set to "shuffle" with a large playlist, whereas half had actual DJs who played the same stuff you get on local radio. That's fine, there were some music channels I liked that had more variety than I heard in Kansas City.
The other half the channels had commercials. Some have lots of commercials, like CNN Radio, which is really just a feed from CNN's TV without the images.
The quality of sound isn't as good as expected, either, mostly because the XM receiver does not hook directly up to my speakers. I had to buy and adaptor that sent out the XM signal into radio waves that my car antenna picked up. This diluted sound quality and also forced me to occasionally change the FM frequency depending on the frequency of local radio stations. Some busy metropolitan areas that I drove through have few empty frequencies, meaning XM becomes more or less useless. Combine that with XM's inability to work when surrounded by tall buildings or, bizarrely, on highway on-ramps, and it's a wonder they sell any radios to people in cities.
The biggest selling point for XM over Sirius (back when they were separate companies) was the promise of MLB baseball broadcasts. All of them. I don't spend three hours at a time in my car, but the receiver I bought came with a home stereo. I could take the receiver out of the cradle in my car and plug it into the stereo for my listening pleasure. After the merger with Sirius, however, my home receiver no longer works. It's now just a shitty CD player that uses a lot of power and has extra wires. It sits in my closet for months at a time.
Of course, the stereo was shoddily made anyway. The part where the XM receiver plugs in has too many moving parts. It resembles more of the original spring-loaded cartridge system of the NES, rather than the top-mounted simplicity of the Super NES.
Not only was the stereo shoddily made, but so was the XM receiver and the dock mounted in my car. The dock rattles noisily whenever I drive at speeds over 50 miles per hour, which I do on the highway, through school zones, in parking lots, and after too many drinks*. The receiver lost its main "do everything" button after being taken back and forth from my car to my shitty stereo too often, so now I can't do simple things like change the FM frequency.
*Parts of this statement may not be true. There is too much traffic to hit 50 on the highway since I moved to California, for instance.
The Sirius merger was supposed to come with better stations. Instead, it changed the stations all just a little bit, to something often less tolerable. For instance, my favorite '90s rock station changed to something that plays Creed. That's not cool. All the good stuff Sirius had that XM didn't, like football and Howard Stern, is part of a pricier premium package. Also, they have now started to charge for subscribers to listen to streaming Internet feeds, something that used to be free. So, given that my shitty stereo no longer works, I can't listen to baseball unless I'm in my car unless I decide to pony up more cash.
I paid $300 all told for the XM receiver and car installation. I have to view that as a sunk cost. XM is no longer worth the monthly rate. And if Sirius XM is losing the customers it already has, what does that say for its future as a business?
