Indie programming realignment at XM
Ever since I’ve had XM in my car—about three years now—there have been two indie channels in the XM universe: XM 43 (“XMU”), and XM 52 (“Unsigned”). XMU is marketed as a college radio format, and more or less rotates a selection from the CMJ Top 200, with very little music more than two years old. They’re slow on the uptake, usually anywhere from two to six months behind CMJ’s adds (and therefore most “indie” formatted college and public radio stations). Ostensibly a rock station, XMU also plays indie hip-hop and electronica in occaisional hour-long hosted blocks. (If you’re keeping score at home, this is actually where I got the idea to label anything not rock-formatted at KSCR as a “specialty show.” KEXP, the king of indie radio, kind of does this too.) XMU’s normal programming hours are fully automated, with pretty heavy imaging every 3-4 songs.
Unsigned, in contrast, has been a study in how not to program a radio station: they only play artists without record deals, and, further dividing that microgenre, they only play alternative rock. The music has been, well, horrible. Instead of searching out upcoming, unsigned innovators (e.g. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah in the last 8 months), they’ve just spun a long list of mainstream alternative KROQ wannabes. There’s a reason all those artists are terminally unsigned. It was a total waste of an interesting (albeit novelty) programming concept.
A couple months ago, I noticed that Unsigned started playing artists who definitely have record deals. Not coincidentally, the quality of music improved. I also noticed that, gee, they seem to be playing Arts+Crafts artists a whole lot—BSS, Jason Collett, and Most Serene Republic. Hey, and there’s the Constantines! It didn’t occur to me instantly (since Montreal and Toronto have been at the center of the cultural universe for indie music since the early ’00s), but Unsigned has been playing a lot more signed Canadian artists. Unfortunately, every other indie Canadian track is still bumpered by the same tired mid-’90s alternative rock rehash. Apparently, Canadian mid-’90s alternative rock rehash.
The station also adopted some air talent. Actually, it seems to be just one guy (considering the majority of XM is voice tracked, that’s not unusual). He brands the station as “XM 52” with no mention of Unsigned. This is a little confusing to me, since my radio still gives “Unsigned” as the channel name. Maybe my radio is just caching the old name?
So I hit up xmradio.com to investigate. It turns out that I’ve been listening to XM 52 (un)Signed:New / Emerging Rock from Canada New, emerging and recently discovered Canadian rock artists have a home on (un)Signed. From heavy metal to mainstream, modern rock to eclectic, folk and roots rock, new and emerging rock artists are making noise on (un)Signed. You’ll hear artists like Our Lady Peace, Default, Theory of a Deadman, Death From Above 1979, The New Pornographers, Metric, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene.Of course, Our Lady Peace was “emerging” eleven years ago, in 1995, but hey, who’s counting.
It looks like XM made the shift in part due to their new official presence in Canada. They also changed seven other stations for the Canadian market, although US subscribers receive all the stations that XM offers. On the other hand, Canadian subscribers’ radios are programmed at activation time to block five US music channels, and quite a bit of US sports and talk programming.
Canadian terrestrial stations have long had to conform to the CRTC’s rules for Canadian content: 35% of music selections from 6am to 6pm must be Canadian, as defined by the oft-maligned MAPL system. It appears that the rule for satellite providers is 10%, to reflect that XM and Sirius’s broadcasts originate in (and mostly serve) the US. When you do the math (8 XM stations changed, many US-centric sports and talk stations removed, some amount of Canadian content already existed on XM), it probably works out to something like 10%.
If I have time, I’d like to write a quick script to scrape XMFan’s artist/title reporter and do an analysis of exactly what XMU and (un)Signed are playing (XMFan doesn’t archive song history because it violates XM’s TOS).