You are correct - however, this has been the case with most channels for a long time. Go to dogstarradio.com, click on "most played artists and songs" at the bottom, then pick a channel. Coffeehouse plays their top artists about 60 times/week. Keep in mind that most channels have several hours of special programming per week, so you lose about 1 day/week for that, so divide the play count by 6 (instead of 7). This yields 10 plays per day of each artist, and 5 plays per day of a specific song.

Amazingly, the Spectrum is worse! It's called the Spectrum for a reason, but they play U2 and John Mayer over 70 times a week, and the top songs are played 5 times per day!

If you click on "search playlists", you'll see that for any given artist (such as Tom Petty), they simply cycle through every Tom Petty song in their playlist, in nearly a fixed order. It's all predetermined and automatic. Variety would take much more work.

Ya. I guess that is why I am paying a subscription fee - to make someone put in a little work to make this better than FM. Preprogrammed, repeatitive, and stale programming can be found on 95% of the FM stations out their. If they want to retain subscriptions maybe they should start putting in some work. I was going through my favorites list the other day and I was amazed on how many artists rarely come up. Use the entire catalog and start playing for what we are paying for.

Great points there

But really, it's not that hard because they played a bunch of performances Coffee House doesn't have on XM's Channel 2 on Sundays from a couple of years ago. Sirius/XM have a whole backlog of crap they could dig up for this channel, but just choose not to. And that's a

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And that brings up an interesting point, that perhaps they don't want to expand the playlist, maybe they're targeting the half-hour-long listener, and they want to make sure that they hear recognizeable music in that time frame. As you say, they have a huge repository of music (just listen to the Loft), but they're going for the short-term listener.

I was a "Spectrum Tastemaker" for 2 years, until I realized that my repeated complaints about the redundancy of a fixed set of artists was being ignored, so I gave up. Now I rarely listen to the Spectrum, because their formula sucks.

Other than Howard, I mostly listen to XM U, which has a broad playlist.

The issue is that if they expand the playlist they end up playing songs that you have never heard. While that may sound appealing, I found it hard to listen most XM stations without constant channel changes. I have found that with Sirius, I listen to stations for a few hours, then move on to another channel.

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Still, they could expand by playing more songs by the same artists. How many songs off a CD do they play? 4? 5? What about playing 12 or 13?

Honestly I hate to be so blunt, but this is total nonsense! It is very easy for them to expand the playlist without going so deep that they have to play music that no one has heard. The fact is that the programmers are freaking lazy asses and if they just took the time to add music and remove music on a regular roation they could keep the playlist fresh. The fact is that most stations over time become very predictable and stale, which it simply doesn't have to be that way.

I always hear this stuff about how XM's statation played all this music that was never heard that too is just BS. XM decades channels played all the music from within a decade not just the top 10 hits over and over and over. XM's decades channels also made you feel like you were back in the day. I rarely heard music that I could say I had not heard before. Sirius has totally lost this appeal and they have also even on current hits channels lost that interactive appeal that XM had.

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I agree with both TX & DAB. The rest I didn't stray far from the decade channels on XM was all the crap they'd play in between the good songs. The rock, country, & r&b channels were all like that. The Jazz channels played 90% stuff I'd never heard, so it didn't matter to me what they played on Watercolors.

With the exception of the lack of R&B on the '80s & '90s, Sirius has the better playlist for me, but they can still expand the playlist in most cases
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Yea, I agree. I like the genre of music they on the Coffee House channel, but the repetitiveness is ridiculous.

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Yea, the in-studio live performances are nice. That's something that they are kinda doing well. Except I'm usually not listening when they have them. It'd be nice to be able to pull them up on-demand.

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