Despite my concern about satellite radio's impact on Canadian radio, I have long been a fan of, and a listener to, the programming of XM and Sirius Radio. I recently had an email exchange with Greg Bell, the programmer and host of XM's Radio Classics channel, which has been my good and steady companion for many, many nights. The channel's programming is really from my mother's youth, not mine, but I got hooked on "golden age" radio when CBC broadcast the occasional program to fill summer hours in the 1970s. Greg obviously loves his job, and I can't blame him.

However, it's hard not to be a little apprehensive about the future of Greg's channel, and others that do not mimic a terrestrial radio format. Sirius recently lost Public Radio International, a channel of mostly thoughtful non-commercial programming. XM has discontinued many of the channels that attracted me to the service in the first place, including both of their world music channels (World Zone and Ngoma), a lounge channel (On the Rocks), and a blender filled with strangeness that was called Special X.

These channels have been replaced by various pop and rock formats that to me tend to sound a bit much like the same old thing. Sirius even replaced its world music channel with wall-to-wall Rolling Stones. Do we really need more of that? I'm hoping that XM keeps its remaining unique content -- channels like Fine Tuning, Cinemagic, and Audio Visions -- or I'll be buying the next big thing a little earlier than expected.