One of the early draws for <Sirius and XM subscribers was the fact that they could not only get commercial free music, but they could also listen to some great uncensored content. For the adult crowd this means that you get to listen to guys like Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge without constant bleeping or cuts to commercials. It’s pretty sweet.

The details on Bubba’s deal with Sirius XM are obviously being kept private, but it’s good to know that the company is listening to what their fans want. Hey – today is the last day before Christmas and I’m telling you that Sirius XM is a great gift for anyone with a long commute or who spends a lot of time traveling. It’s great for music in the office, too!

Shameless pre-Christmas promotion – success!

The point of this entry, really, though is to congratulate Sirius XM for keeping Bubba the Love Sponge on board and thus making their fans happy. Good work!

Bear in mind they also took off the first two weeks of July. Ummm…that’s four full weeks off in the summer months. I know that Howard’s brainwashed fans will say that he’s earned the break, but there are many millions more of us who are just fans of the show and feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods with the Howard Stern gang. We were told about commercial-free radio before he made the jump – we now get frequent 15-minute, non-live content breaks in the middle of his shows.

We were told that the show would be in the studio on the occasional Friday to surprise the audience. Bullshit on that! He spent a few Fridays in the studio when he started Sirius – more than two and a half years ago now.

Then we were told about all of the great content that we’d get after Sirius XM and Stern bought back his tapes from CBS Radio/Viacom. What do they give us? A completely randomized selection of shows from all over Howard’s history with no rhyme or reason as to why they were playing certain shows. This crappy “Master Tape Theater” was so poorly received that the Stern folks were forced to move it into some weird Sunday afternoon time slot when no one is listening anyway.

Before he made the jump, Stern sold us on something like 33 cents per day or 45 cents per day to hear him on Sirius. Okay – then let me pay just the 45 cents on each day that he’s in the building. In August, I would have paid $3.60 to hear Howard and his crew.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that the merger went through. I really do like satellite radio and I really do enjoy listening to the Howard Stern Show. But paying the $14 that I pay each month (tax included) is not worth what I’m getting in terms of service. I hear that with the merger there will be an option to get 50 channels of your choice and pay $6.99 per month. Let’s get that figured out and in motion already!