Both services seem like great ideas that have largely gone extinct. Radio that you never lose reception with... streaming music with a user-seeded playlist... just hard to get excited about in 2018. Or 2008 really.
Pandora was a first mover, and they have 70 million monthly users, they are the elephant in the room. As a teen I rather enjoyed certain SirusXM channels while driving in friends cars, and if there was a reasonably priced SirusXM/Pandora bundle, I may be tempted to subscribe. Combined these two companies have 100 million users.
> if there was a reasonably priced SirusXM/Pandora bundle...
The fact that SirusXM wants you to pay extra for their streaming service after you're already spending ~$16/month/radio makes me think that any kind of "reasonably priced" bundle is very unlikely.
>streaming music with a user-seeded playlist... just hard to get excited about in 2018. Or 2008 really.
The only reason why I think that may be the case is because Pandora has been doing it so well for a long time.
I've never managed to get that out of other services. Am I doing things wrong? I'm all ears for suggestions, especially now that Pandora might go through some changes due to acquisition.
Yes. The thing with Youtube is that it only can use one song as a seed, whereas with a Pandora station, you use multiple positive and negative seeds to trim the station to your taste.
It's like comparing weeds growing in your backyard to a carefully trimmed bonsai tree.
However, I'd go to Youtube for hand-picked playlists. There's always a place for that.
Spotify often suggests me songs I already like but haven't listened to on the platform, which is a good sign to me. The suggestions are also just diverse enough for me to discover new stuff.
I don't know Pandora or Youtube (though I have generally bad experience with its suggestions), but am pretty happy with Spotify.
>Spotify often suggests me songs I already like but haven't listened to on the platform
This is exactly why I like Pandora, to the point of it being eerie at times.
Like that one time when I was listening to a Trans Am[1] CD in my car, and thought - well, I've listened to that disk enough times already; let's listen to something new on Pandora -- and it gave me that exact track, while the band never popped up on any of my stations before!
The band was not a station seed, and it's not a band with a huge presence either - I got their CD randomly somewhere.
I know it's a coincidence, but just goes to show how well their algorithms are tuned.
And sadly this isn't even the case. I recently purchased a new car that came with the SiriusXM 3-month trial. We drop reception in the country and in town (among tall buildings). In fact, it drops more often than mobile internet (why doesn't XM have 10s buffer?).
The subscription is also more expensive than Apple Music or Google Play Music and the car comes with Android Auto and CarPlay. How they expect to compete is beyond me. I guess that's why they bought Pandora.
It's odd because some of the first generation Sirius radios touted "DVR" like functionality, which makes it clear that buffering is possible. I would imagine they started to phase out that element of the hardware because of cost (especially since most are bundled with the vehicle)
In the same line of thinking, my navigation apps (Google Maps and Waze) also glitch out when driving through extended length tunnels (under Boston for example). I find this odd given that the app knows my route, and these tunnels are used by millions each year.
I worked on some of those XM radios with the DVR/buffering capability, before the merger.
Really, it was just limited to the amount of storage you had. I think the one I did allowed up to 30 minutes but of course you lost it when you switched channels.
The music is so insanely compressed (the best channels were 32 kbit AAC+) and RAM/Flash is so much cheaper now, it could really be anything you wanted these days.
The satellite signal itself has a bit of time diversity in it (in case one of the birds disappears), like about 1500 mSec worth, as well as terrestrial backup transmitters in most cities (SXM's dirty little secret), so if you really have loss of signal you must be underground for a while.
I lose reception in the forests outside my metro area. Exactly the place I would most want to use it since I have more than a few enjoyable radio stations available to me in the city. When I lose reception on them, I also tend to lose reception on XM. At least enough to be annoying.
Even if it did, that would just delay your signal loss by 10 seconds. It only receives a signal so there's no way it could catch up with what it missed.
A modern service could broadcast music files to your radio and then just schedule those, rather than sending a stream like a FM radio. But that's not how Sirius works now.
Yeah, I got a call from SiriusXM about 60 days after I bought my Accord; Honda gave my contact information and VIN over to them. The person on the phone asked if I liked the 90 day trial and how I'd feel about subscribing.
I told her I never tried it; the car had CarPlay and I plugged in with Spotify right away.
She didn't even bother trying to convince me to use the service. "Oh, yeah, I can see how convenient that is. Let us know if you ever change your mind."
I experience the same thing with Sirius. Going under an overpass means about 2 seconds of audio drop. I don’t know anything about their tech but I always assumed buffering isn’t feasible. I would really hope they’d have implemented it if they could.
There are specific locations where I lose signal extremely consistently. Like the right-turn lane of a road near my office. No bridge, no particularly tall buildings - just a small spot where the radio cuts out every time.
I like Pandora - I don't feel like creating my own playlists and Pandora does a pretty good job of playing music I like after a few thumbs up/downs.
Sometimes though I really want to listen to a particular artist and I use Amazon Music Unlimited for that, but their playlists are not as good (to me) as Pandora.
