I am an XM Radio subscriber. A couple of years ago I reviewed the Roady, a little unit that could be used in the car, home or office and even moved around between the three. At first, I had been a little disappointed that I couldn't score one of the fancier Delphi radios like the one that smoothly transitions from a dash-mounted receiver to a boombox to a home stereo unit. It looked cool, it had more features, and... well, I pretty much covered it with "it looked cool."

Lately, though, I've come to realize that the Roady is the better deal. For one thing, these days it's a great deal cheaper (you can pick one up for under fifty bucks now if you look around) and there are a ton of new accessories for you to play with. My favorite is the Personal Audio System that converts your Roady into a portable, Walkman-like player.

So the Roady, as it turns out, was the way to go after all. It's cost effective and it has a ton of accessories.

Now that my pitch for the XM Roady is done, though, here's the point...

Radio, as we've known it, is dying.

I live in Houston now, but I grew up about eighty miles away in a small town where there wasn't much in the way of music stores. The closest one was about thirty-minutes away in a town called Lake Jackson. But even though I did buy the occasional cassette (and later CD), I largely depended on the radio for my musical experience. We were in range to receive all of Houston's finest, and everyone had their favorites. In general, you had three stations you listened to regularly and you scorned anything else on the dial.

As I got older my musical tastes changed only slightly, but I still found myself searching the dial for something - anything - to listen to. This was because all my old stand-by stations were being bought out and reformatted. One of my biggest nightmares as a young college student came as I hopped into my car, tuned to 93Q and discovered to my horror that overnight it had gone from a pop music station to... blegh.... Country.

A short time later, another favorite of mine switched from classic rock to Tejano, which I would later learn was to be the trend for the vast majority of stations on the dial. And if it wasn't Tejano music, it was... blegh... Country or, worse yet, rap music.

Now, for those who appreciate Tejano and country and rap, I deeply apologize. You have every right to listen to whatever you choose. I have no appreciation for these musical forms, however, and yet I found myself being inundated with them.

Musical preferences aside, though, there were other petty annoyances that were starting grate on my nerves. Morning talk radio was... well, it was morning talk radio. Inane chatter about meaningless topics. If you're going to talk, at least be intelligent about it! Talk about current events, about politics, about (yuck) SPORTS even, but let's lay off of the witty banter about the culinary differences between gas station hot dogs and James Coney Island, or Miracle Whip vs. Hellmans mayonnaise.

If your goals is to listen to music in the mornings, you're out of luck.

Add to this the hours of mind-numbing commercials your forced to endure and you find yourself clocktower bound.

When I first got the Roady to review, it was only $10 per month to subscribe. When it went up, I did some serious pondering as to whether it would be worth it to keep the service. I had already had to make the decision once - as part of my review I had received a few months of service for free. So, after the price hike I toyed with going back to "regular radio," only to discover that half the stations I had listened to were now Tejano or... blegh... Country or were gone all together. The only things left to me were one or two Clear Channel clones that played the same two songs over and over again and a very popular radio station that was famous for its DJs... not its music. Suddenly the thirteen bucks per month that it costs to have a satellite radio system seems cheap at twice the price.

With XM I can listen to music commercial free, and I have a few hundred choices to scan through. I have my three or four favorites, of course.

But here's an irony for you - all that music available to me and I listen to talk radio about 90% of the time I'm in the car. Somewhere along the way I got old or something. I'd rather listen to Sean Hannity than Nickleback (although I do like Nickleback). Go figure, I'm topical.

So the point is, radio is dying. I think it's only a matter of time before subscription services rule the airwaves. In a world where commercials are more prevalent than music, I think people are getting to the point where they'd do anything, pay anything, to just have a break from advertisement for a while. And for the music aficionados in the bunch, the selection is hands-down much better than you'll find anywhere on the dial. And no DJs!

Makes a fella want to cry.

J. Kevin Tumlinson is the Editor of ViewOnline Magazine at www.viewonline.com. He is also a producer and writer for his company, Hat Digital Media (www.hatdigitalmedia.com). Kevin is Sirius about XM Radio.