Rich Mintz  

OK, I’ve done it: I’ve subscribed to Sirius XM satellite radio. This despite owning hundreds of CDs and gigabytes of ripped and downloaded music, having streaming music available at my command bundled with Time Warner and Roku products and services I’ve already paid for, having a Pandora account that I basically like, and, you know, having access to the Internet, which contains for free (for those willing to dig) every single musical note ever played in the history of man, multiplied a zillion times over.

So here’s the deal. In the course of my one-week free trial, I discovered that despite all that music I already had access to, I actually listen to a lot more music via this Sirius XM/iPhone/docking station three-way marriage than I’ve listened to since I gave up my XM subscription. A lot more, like five times as much. And that music involves a broader variety of genres, and a broader variety of songs, including both songs that awaken my nostalgia and songs I’ve never heard of before. And about half of the background music I’m adding to my media diet is directly crowding out background episodes of reality TV. Good stuff, right?

One of the business facts I’m reminded by all this is that people don’t just pay a premium for innovation in product, they pay a premium for innovation in delivery experience, too, and in packaging of that experience, and especially in the consistency and reliability thereof. It’s worth money just not to have to think — to be able to take for granted that something will just work. Netflix figured that out with DVDs-by-mail, and then figured it out again with streaming, and Apple of course figured it out ages ago and has put it into practice half a dozen times, in a range of sectors that are gradually converging. FedEx figured it out, by taking something (overnight delivery via USPS) that was perceived, rightfully or not, as a dicey proposition and making it 100% trustworthy.

So now, wherever I plop myself down, I dock my phone, I hit the Sirius XM button, I fiddle with the display for just a moment, and within 10 seconds I’m listening to an interesting stream of music. I don’t even think; I just do it. Now that’s the kind of reliability I’d happily pay $12 a month for.

John Scalzi’s post last week about living in the future (not to mention Scott Adams’ reminder last December that we’re all cyborgs now, now that we’re carrying our exobrains around in our pockets) has got me thinking about the same thing. I joke about wanting the Internet in my head, but if you get a drink or two in me, I’ll confess that I’m pretty damn impressed with the stuff we’ve got already.

The latest entry in the “hey, when did all this stuff happen?” sweepstakes is Voice Control on the iPhone 4. Press and hold the home button for a minute, and your personal digital assistant waits for your command. “Play artist Alison Krauss,” you can command. Or, “What song is this?” Or, “Call Martha Jones.” And it actually works!

Yes, I got an iPhone 4 this week (somehow all the queues and secret lists and 24-hour windows are now yesterday’s news; I walked into the Upper West Side Apple Store and had one in 15 minutes). And yes, I’m amazed — FaceTime and the super-sharp screen and the two cameras and all that stuff, it really is remarkable. Video, with editing right on the device! Multitasking! I can listen to Sirius XM radio while converting between ounces and grams! (And it comes with a free iPod Touch, in the form of my defunct iPhone 3G, which still works perfectly well via wireless and continues to do everything it ever did, except make phone calls — which I don’t do much of anymore anyway, and neither do you, but I digress.)

But the innovations are turning up fast and furious these days. Take Dragon Dictation, which is available for iPhone and iPod Touch and iPad and BlackBerry, and soon for your toaster and electric toothbrush. I like the idea of voice-to-text, but I type fast and accurately, even on small devices, so the value hasn’t been evident. But Dragon’s accuracy is now so good that, for certain situations in certain circumstances, I could imagine choosing to use it. Look at these two passages I dictated last night (in the first, I was just riffing, in the second I was reading from this story on The Awl about freelancing, which you should read anyway):

Once upon a time there was an angry dragon. The dragon was very, very angry.
One day, the dragon was walking down the street, and he came upon the lion. Lyon, he said, what say you?
John, said the lion, I am very happy to see you.
And thus ends the lesson.
***
But the sword of Damocles isn’t what’s most toxic to the freelance experience. What’s worse is that, in order to be a freelancer for very long, you have to think of yourself in certain ways. You know what they say about beautiful people? That every pretty girl or gorgeous man is someone’s ask, was too much hassle for someone.

This is raw and unedited. Everything came through as I intended. The punctuation. The paragraph breaks. It got “thus.” It got “freelancer.” It got “Damocles”! The only problems were “Lyon” for “Lion” in the first passage, and “ask” for “ex” in the second. That is a level of accuracy I can live with.

Or try SoundHound. Nevermind holding it up to the radio speakers to identify a song; that’s kid stuff. It identified Nessun dorma from my humming. And I’m no Pavarotti. This isn’t beyond incredible?

(And we’re nowhere near the bleeding edge. Have you heard of Google Goggles?)

Think of the last cellphone you had. Not the first one — just the last one. (Or, if you were an early iPhone adopter, the one before that.) The one I had was a Nokia e62, running Symbian — which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, I detested every moment my fingers were on it. It did hardly anything except make phone calls, download my email, and make me wait while it swapped data in and out of RAM. Put it next to the iPhone 4, and it’s like setting down a lawnmower next to an Audi TT Coupe. If not for the fact that both of them make phone calls (something which fewer and fewer of us bother to do), they might as well be the products of parallel UI evolution on distant planets. And I carried that thing around in my pocket all day, every day, in 2007! I think I have mayonnaise that’s older than that.

So, if on some day in the distant future, when you are an old, old man, a little child asks you when the past ended and the future began, you can tell them with confidence that it was yesterday, August 2, 2010, when Rich Mintz got his iPhone 4. Or something like that.

I think I’m readdicted to satellite radio (that didn’t take long, did it?). It’s a whole new ballgame now that my iPhone, combined with the docking speakers that are already strategically placed around my life, can play satellite radio anytime I feel like it.* Sure is easier than hauling that boom box around in the car, like I did in 2002!

In honor of my new addictions, here’s a musical gem turned up for me by the inspired programmers at Sirius XM: “Indiana Wants Me” (1970), a Canadian #1 and American #5 hit, by R. Dean Taylor.

*Some of my docking speakers aren’t compatible with iPhone 4. Fortunately, they’re the crappy ones I already hated…

…and that means bluegrass and Nashville country, both via satellite radio and iTunes. Here are a few of the background albums that will keep me productive today:

And here’s a little flavor of what’s rumbling through my office. Or try this:

Or, for a total change of pace, this:

I bought into the idea of satellite radio quite early, right around the time I moved to Atlanta in 1999. Often what brings us to try new technologies is the recommendation of others, but I didn’t need one for this, because satellite radio seemed like a no-brainer — commercial radio at the time was awful (maybe it still is, but who listens anymore?), I was living in a place where I couldn’t get consistent NPR, I missed the bluegrass and community programming on WAMU — and then this New Thing came along.

From the start, I was an XM loyalist, and not just because I knew several people who worked at their headquarters in DC (although that was part of it — and I loved the company’s roots in the District itself, where they outfitted studios in a then-ratty neighborhood off New York Avenue NE before it was obvious to everyone else that the gentrification of that part of DC would actually work). XM was the purist’s choice; in their founding narrative, which I’m sure was more than a little true, they amassed a stupefying collection of recordings, hired the world’s best music curators and on-air talent, and set out to make something worth our loyalty, in response to the appalling field of steaming manure that commercial radio had become in the ClearChannel era. Sirius, by way of contrast, always felt like a naked money play.

So XM raised a stunning amount of money (there were satellites involved, after all — and if I recall correctly, one of the early ones went off course toward Mars or fell into the sea or something, and they had to build a new one — I’m sure it’s on the Internet, you can look it up), and over the next several years, they stumbled in the direction of profitability without ever quite losing their soul. I remained a subscriber for 8 years (!), upgrading my radio once or twice. I’m no music snob — I’m not even that much of a connoisseur — but there’s music I just plain like that you can’t hear on commercial radio and that’s too much work to steal off the Internet or rip from CDs. And besides, part of the point of radio has always been that an intelligent editor programs it for you, at least in theory, so that you can learn about things you’ll like but wouldn’t have found otherwise. Services like Pandora achieve a similar aim in a different way, but I find they require too much thinking to make me happy.

With XM, I was able to indulge my love of legitimate bluegrass, and dance and electronica, and even (to my secret shame) kickass Nashville country music. (Anyone who doesn’t like Kenny Chesney after listening to this or this, or Tim McGraw after this, or Trisha Yearwood after this, needs their head examined.) I bought multiple boomboxes and accessories so I could listen in the car and at home and especially in my bookstore (Peachtree Highway Books, in Atlanta’s Candler Park, 2002-2004, R.I.P.), where I spent most of my waking hours for two years. (Yes, XM, I was an occasional terms-of-service violator, as were many, many other intown Atlanta small businesses in those exciting entrepreneurial years.)

When I moved briefly to Little Rock in 2003-4, I discovered other XM loyalists among my friends. So apparently it wasn’t just me! We traded tips and occasionally even shared equipment. XM kept me company on those long, long drives from Atlanta to Little Rock (usually with an overnight in Tupelo). And in 2005-6, as friends and I founded BusyTonight in New York and tried hard to make a go of our technology business, XM was one of the things that kept me sane during that turbulent period.

I ended up canceling my XM for a combination of cost reasons and lack of use — for a period of several months, I just wasn’t home much, in that way you can get in a city like New York before you get your grownup footing. But now I’m feeling the hankering. Among other things, I feel the lack of editorially programmed bluegrass in my life, and the podcasts I listen to aren’t doing it for me. So I think I’m going to resubscribe. I just passed four hours on JetBlue in the past 24 hours with satellite radio playing in my ears continuously — and I like it. I was worried that the Sirius/XM merger would wreck everything, but most of my old favorite channels are still there, so it’s time to give it another try.