A Look Back as Sirius and Sirius Backstage Celebrate 5 Years: Part I
On February 14th, 2002, Sirius Satellite Radio launched service with a kick-off party at Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City in Jackson, MS. Also on that date, Sirius Backstage launched, starting as a fan page on technobistro.com. Over the next five years, while Sirius became the premier satellite radio provider, Sirius Backstage became the number one fansite for all things Sirius.
All this week Sirius Backstage looks back on five years of Sirius Satellite Radio. We have plenty of old advertisements, pics of prototype radios, channel lineups, and so on to talk about. From the loss of I-90 to the gain of Howard and everything in between. Today, we start with how Sirius came to be, the launch, and up to the end of 2002:
1990: Satellite CD Radio is formed, in order to buy spectrum the FCC is auctioning off for a “Digital Audio Radio Service”. They are competing with three other companies, including American Mobile Radio Corporation, now known as XM Radio.
1992: The company’s name changes to CD Radio
1994: CD Radio goes public with the ticker symbol CDRD, raising $7.5 million. They promise that when they start service, it will include 30 music stations and charge less than $10 per month
1997: CD Radio wins the auction, along with American Mobile, to acquire spectrum, and pays over $80 million for it.
June 1999: CD Radio signs agreement with Ford to be the exclusive satellite radio company for Ford vehicles.
November 18, 1999: CD Radio is renamed Sirius Satellite Radio. Ticker symbol changes to SIRI in January 2000.
2000: Sirius launches their three satellites June 30th, September 5th, and November 30th, 2000.
February 2000: Sirius and XM announce that they will work to form a satellite radio receiver that receives both signals.
Mid-2001: ClubXM launches, and quickly becomes the largest fan site and forum(at that time) for satellite radio.
2001: Sirius chipsets made by Lucent were not working properly, and delayed the company well past the original start date of early 2001. Shareholders sued, claiming that Sirius made false claims and knowingly lied when they stated service would start in 2001.
May 2001: Sirius announces it plans to charge $12.95 for the service, $3/month more than they stated before.
February 14, 2002: They launch their service at Cowboy Maloney’s in Jackson, MS. One young man named Jeff who went to Tulane University was there and took some pictures(and more here). He wanted to show the world, and Sirius Backstage was born.
Service was slowly rolled out over the spring of 2002, with the full nationwide launch on July 1st, 2002. The first radios included the Jensen SSR2000(left), which involved mounting a tuner box behind the Dash or under your seat. This baby loved to give off heat, and it could almost double as a skillet. Other radios available at the time of launch included the Audiovox Universal FM System. The Audiovox is also the only aftermarket add-on radio that had the same design for both XM and Sirius
June 20, 2002: A Sirius commercial airs on MTV, this is vastly different from most of their other ad campaigns so far.
August 15, 2002: XMFan is created as a joint venture by Ryan Morris and ‘Ziggy’.
September 20, 2002: As Club XM owners and moderators start losing their motivation, Jeff launches the Sirius Backstage forums in order to provide a new home for Sirius fans.
The image above is what people got to see for about 5 seconds every time they loaded a forum page; thankfully we haven’t had that for about 3 years now.
October 2002: Sirius announces a reorganization of the company’s debt, exchanging $1.5 billion of company debt, preferred stock, and cash for common stock, and causing the number of outstanding shares to increase tenfold, from less than 100 million to one billion.
October 7, 2002: Sirius announces Crispin as their ad agency. The agency would later produce the ‘it’s_ON’ ads for Sirius.
Fall 2002: Popular Science has a blurb about a new boombox(right). It has a Sirius tuner built-in, was supposed to be released by Kenwood(although the boombox itself was branded Jensen), and cost $500.
November 2002: New FM-modulated tuners are released, including ones by Kenwood, Panasonic, and Clarion.
November 4, 2002: I-60, the station for 60s Hits comes online. I-90 is taken off to make room.
November 15, 2002: Hertz to start installing Sirius in its vehicles.
December 31, 2002: Sirius ends the year with 29,947 subscribers
Tomorrow we will cover 2003: From ad campaigns and huge lineup changes to consultants and cool radio prototypes, 2003 had it all.