OTHER TECH

MAXX MYRICK (Real Jazz, Luna): A passion for music - and creativity. Also, you can communicate with us, and we'll play your favorite song. We're not just DJs and program directors. The people here reflect the channels they work with. You can't get that from a CD changer.

LOU BRUTUS (Special X): I don't care how many CDs you have, there's never been anything like Special X. It could be the day-to-day stuff that falls under the umbrella of "weirdness," where you might hear "What's He Building in There?" from Tom Waits, followed by William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," followed by a 28-minute Jack Kerouac piece. Or we could devote three days to the 1,000 worst songs of all time. We'll take something from every conceivable genre of music, as long as it fits subject-wise. The people at XM are thinking all of this stuff out and putting it together in coherent neighborhoods of sound, for lack of a better term. When radio is done right, I think it's the most personal medium of them all. Clockwise from top left, Maxx, Phlash, Tobi, and Lou

S&V: What kind of feedback are you getting?

LOU: I just got an e-mail from a woman who was driving down Route 285 in Colorado when she heard someone saying, "Hi, Cutie! Hi, Cutie!" for 5[1/2] minutes. It was annoying as hell to her, but she had to sit through it to find out what it was. And as it turns out, it was a feature on Special X called "The Fabulous World of Parrot Training Records." We take a cut at a time off one of these records and give each one a flowery introduction and outro, to make it sound like the Second Coming. So she heard that and pretty much got hooked on the channel. I play stuff by what I call categorically challenged artists. There are so many of these performers who have small, but very loyal fan bases - they'll never get serviced on traditional radio or on cable TV. But if you put them all together in one pot, it creates a rather odd-sounding bouillabaisse.

TOBI (XMU): Special X and the other niche channels like XMU offer things that don't have a home anywhere else. People might not actively seek this music out. But once they hear it, they're like, "That's so cool. I want to hear more." That's what I think is great about XM. There's something for everybody.

MAXX: Where else can you hear a live concert in the middle of the afternoon? We do it right here, in our studio. We had Kenny Garrett in here last week.

TOBI: Where else can you turn on the radio in the afternoon and hear an awesome indie-rock band like The Dismemberment Plan or Hockey Night playing live? Not everybody's going to like that, but the people who do are going to be like, "I can't believe they even know who Hockey Night is." And that's what happens on every single channel.

LOU: The Unsigned band channel is 24 hours a day of undiscovered artists. I know a group out of Columbus, Ohio, called Watershed that put out a brilliant album last year, and they sold over 10,000 copies just at gigs and so on. But given the difficult position the recording industry is in, unless you're selling 5 million copies, you're going to get lost in the shuffle. Where are bands like Watershed going to go to? Suddenly there's this thing called XM that can make things happen for them.

TOBI: That happens a lot on my XMU, which is new music. We're equated with college radio, but I think that sells it short, because we deal with so many different genres of new music, whether it's underground hip-hop or downtempo or electronica or indie rock. And it's the same thing because some of these little labels are just a step up from Unsigned. Where on earth are they ever going to get played again - or ever. I get e-mails all the time from people who say, "You know what, Tobi? I got XM because I thought that I wouldn't have to buy any new CDs because I was going to be getting all this new music and all of these different channels. But I just went out and spent $50 on new CDs today." They're actually buying these albums they hear. Everybody is so busy, so we filter all of the new music for them. We can say, "Hey, here's this great new band out of Minneapolis" to somebody in, say, Modesto, California, who would never have heard about Hockey Night. And then they can go out and buy the CD.

MAXX: This is radio the way it used to be. It's all about the music.

PHLASH PHELPS (The 60s): I do the 60s channel, so let me explain a little bit about how the decades channels work. We don't use the word "oldies" here; we use the word "decades" because "old" has such a bad connotation. The FM oldies stations are dropping all those 50s songs, and now they're starting to drop some of the 60s stuff. As the Boomer generation grows older, they're worrying about commercials. But we don't have to worry about that. A year ago, we put together a thing called "Eight Days in May" where I took every hit from the beginning of 1960, which was "El Paso" by Marty Robbins, and went all the way to "Long and Winding Road." I played them chronologically for eight days, nonstop, without commercials. And when we were done, we repeated them, but this time based on how they ranked in the charts. Who else could have done that? It worked so well, we came up with a new thing we call "It" - as in, this is "It." We start in the 40s - 1935, actually - and our 40s channel will play everything up to 1950 in chronological order. Then our 50s channel takes over and plays every song they have. Then we do it for four straight days, and then onto the 70s, 80s, and 90s - it takes almost a month to play every song. And we took it up to 2002. It was such a big hit.

LOU: You needn't have grown up in a particular time to appreciate the style of music from that era, or the actual music from that era. People in their 20s write to me about guys that I play - like Raymond Scott. His stuff's timeless. I mean, Scott not only was a big influence on Carl Stalling and his music for the Warner Bros. cartoons, but he also influenced Andy Partridge from XTC and Frank Zappa. People like the Beau Hunks are still performing Scott's music live.

TOBI: Just because XMU is supposed to be like a college station, you don't have to be in college to like new music. We don't have to pigeonhole, but everything seems to be pigeonholed on regular radio. It's like, "We have to target this demographic, or that one." But good music is good music. If I'm 80 years old and I want to listen to Lemonjelly because it sounds good, I'm going to listen to it.

MAXX: Where do established artists go to get their music played? They can't get it played on traditional radio anymore. If you're over 40 years old, traditional radio won't play it. But I'm 45, and I still want to hear those artists. If they've got new music, why can't I hear it? You can hear it here at XM.

TOBI: New Order and the Pet Shop Boys came out with new albums last year, and we played them. Those are pioneers from when alternative radio was still alternative, but they're never going to get played anywhere. And both of their albums are awesome.

MAXX: People are forever proclaiming jazz dead, but I have about 3,000 brand-new records sitting on my desk. And we're playing all of these new artists. Peter Cincotti - new kid on the scene. Who's going to play his music? I mean, if jazz is dead, these guys are -

LOU: Yeah, somebody'd better phone these guys and let them know.

MAXX: Jazz at one time was the popular music in the culture, just like hip-hop is today. But after the 60s, it went to public radio, where it turned into a kind of elitist music. But we don't pontificate here - we just rock it.

TOBI: The other good thing about XM is that if you write into the programming department and give your suggestions, they take them into consideration. Channels have been reorganized and actually created based on listeners' suggestions. And you always get personal responses, which is kind of amazing.

LOU: This is a living, breathing thing, XM is. A lot of the multiday features and some of the featurettes on Special X started because some guy wrote, "Hey, did you ever think about doing this?" And I'll say, "Good idea," and go into our database - which has literally millions of songs in it - and punch up, say, songs about dogs and see what we get. Wow! 12,000 songs! Then you have to go through them all and find the stuff you want to put in.

MAXX: Our Dixieland program is the result of listener demand.

TOBI: When people write in with a negative reaction to something on XMU, like underground hip-hop, it's not like they're so pissed off that they're never going to listen again. We explain that we do it because it's as much a part of new music culture as anything else. With eight different genres of new music, you're not going to like every single song in every different genre. Some people say, "Well, I don't have a lot of time to scan the dial, so maybe I'll just go listen to something else when you're playing stuff I don't like."

LOU: Then again, scanning the dial on XM, it could take them a month and a half to get back to you.

PHLASH: A lot of people say, "You guys aren't local." Well, if you listen to one hour of my CQ show at 9 a.m. Eastern, you'll hear that people call from all over the country. And wherever they call from, I will talk to them about where they're from, because I've gone through 17 radio stations to get here. By the age of 29, I had been to all 50 states. People will call me and say, "How in the world do you know where I am? Are you, like, tracking me with those satellites?"

S&V: How much freedom do you have to program?

LOU: Total and utter creative freedom. No one ever says yes or no to anything. With Special X, they said, "What if we just gave you this channel, and let you do basically whatever you want with it?" I was like, "Is this a prank?"

MAXX: The level of the talent and creativity in this place is just mindboggling. And it's all working together. We've all worked in markets where we were working against a competitor. Now we have a hundred and one radio stations, and we have access to all that brainpower, all that creativity - for one purpose: for XM. That's an incredible resource.

PHLASH: The liveness is what really brings out a lot of the channels. When you're live, and you're in touch with your audience and they can call and talk to you - that's what really touches the heart. People are like, "My gosh, I actually got my request on."

TOBI: And it's not like we're just robots here. You listen to terrestrial radio now, and they're just reading lineup cards, and they're also voice-tracking 14 other stations. That's all well and good for what they do, but that all becomes generic. I think it's time for a change. Just to see that the Hives and the Vines and all these underground garage-rock-type bands are now getting played on MTV - it's obvious that people want something more than Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. I think our biggest obstacle now is just getting people to understand what we do. And once they hear it, they're in love with it.