When it comes to satellite radio, I was wrong. Back in 2000, when XM and Sirius were announced at CES, I was convinced that both would die a rapid death, with nary a tear shed by anyone but their investors. Why pay ten bucks a month, I reasoned, for something you can get for free?

It was the height of Napster, when free (albeit illegal) music sharing was at its zenith. Royalty-free Internet radio abounded. Decent broadcast radio was not yet an oxymoron. And it seemed that there were much better things to spend money on than music.

So what changed my tune? It had nothing to do with all the marketing money each company spends trying to influence journalists. It wasn't a timely product placement by some enterprising PR rep. Nope, oddly enough, it was a Ford Taurus that first turned my head.

A year and a half ago, I was part of PC Magazine's Editors' Days in Southern California. The meetings were held at the tony Westin Hotel in Newport Beach, but dinner the night before was hosted by Gateway Computers (when there still was such a thing), almost two hours away in San Diego.

Following my longstanding policy of not driving long distances after dinner, I eschewed joining the flotilla of PC Magazine editors hot-footing it back up the coast, and opted to bunk down instead at a local hotel. That meant renting my own car, which suited me just fine anyway.

I've traveled many a long mile in rental cars. I used to carry around CDs and a cassette adapter so I could listen to my own music while driving. But over the past few years, the cassette deck has been phased out of rental cars, and a tiny MP3 player has replaced my kit-bag of CDs and a portable player. That, unfortunately, meant I either had to settle for one of those poor-performing FM broadcasting add-ons, listen to regular radio, or drive with headphones on. Terrible options, all.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that my Hertz Rent A Car Ford Taurus featured a built-in Sirius radio. Soon I found myself heading down Interstate 5, mashing buttons on the satellite radio and swerving madly as I searched for something to listen to. With more than a hundred channels, that wasn't a problem, but finding something appealing was. Eventually, I stumbled on a gold mine—a station that played my favorite genre of music 24 hours a day, seven days a week. — Continue reading