A Conflicted Past with Lots of Promise, and a Future Ripe for Reinvention
Pros
People who *loved* and really knew music ran the channels and interviewed the musicians. The promise from the beginning was that Sirius would be the best of both commercial *and* public radio — musically diverse, intelligently programmed, no insipid advertising disturbing the crafted flow — yet it would go well beyond, to redefine radio as we knew it. Some of that ethic presumably remains if others can vouch for it.
Cons
Upper management and likely some administrators focused seemingly singularly on scrambling to secure investors and in the process relinquished the mission they started out with — and the very reason for its existence. They talked a good game of expectations and cheerleading. Hosts, programmers and producers wisely saw through it and campaigned and fought to do better than was being asked of them. Still, bit by bit, the most talented, capable and creative were relegated to being mere employees: diminished in their capacities or eventually moved out. In short order, Sirius became just another mediocre corporate entity and listeners largely got the same-old-same-old. While the past decade-plus has seen changes and arguable progress, the losses of those early years in morale and squandered customer loyalty seeped into the very fabric of the company's operations; whether those stains and managerial rhetoric from those early days have been expunged is uncertain.
