Sirius Satellite Radio is the fastest-growing satellite radio provider in the world, and now they are selling subscriptions for Internet-only streams. We had a brief chat with Steve Blatter, senior vice president of Music Programming, to talk about the new service and what it’s like to program 64 music channels.

Q: What was the motivation for creating the Internet-streaming subscriptions?
A: Sirius sells radio content, and our primary means of distribution today is via satellite, but as the Internet becomes more and more ubiquitous and more easy to use, we feel that there is as big a market for people listening over the Internet as there is via satellite.

Q: Like most of my friends, I have an iPod with all the music and podcasts I want. What am I missing out on by not subscribing to Sirius Satellite Radio?
A: Well, most importantly, I don’t know much about you specifically, ‘cause everything we do at Sirius, it runs the gamut from everything to classical music channels to heavy metal channels to offering talk programming like Howard Stern and the Playboy Channel, you know, Maxim Radio—I could run down the line for you. But on kind of a broader level, there are 64 music channels that are completely commercial free, which we feel is really critical; we find most American radio users today are extremely frustrated with radio. More importantly, besides the fact that our music channels are commercial-free, there’s a sense of discovery when you listen to Sirius Radio that you just won’t get with an iPod. We put a tremendous amount of resources into each of our music channels, where we have teams of people that comb through literally thousands of songs a week to identify new music we can turn listeners on to, versus an iPod experience where you pretty much have to know what it is you’re looking for, and then first go through the process of trying to find that song and then get it onto your iPod and then start creating your own playlists—I mean, it takes a fair amount of time. So, we believe that it’s really important to that process and making things a lot more easy for the consumer than it is with the iPod experience.

Q: I’m a big Springsteen fan, and I remember at the end of last year, you had E Street Radio, and you have The Who Channel right now that plays full-length live recordings. How do you get an artist’s permission to air such rare material in an era when illegal downloading and copyright infringement are a major concern in the music industry?
A: Well, we work very closely with the artist’s community. We’re partners with the Elvis Presley estate for an Elvis Presley channel, we have an all-Rolling Stone channel and we actually co-produce channels with Eminem and Jimmy Buffet. What we find in our discussions is that it’s an opportunity for them to further extend their brand and reach fans creatively in a way they’ve never been able to reach them before. So if you’re a big fan of The Who listening to The Who Channel here at Sirius, that might actually get you even more excited about the band and their music, whether it be hearing live performances that haven’t been heard before or rare tracks that are very hard to find.

Q: What does your job entail on a day-to-day basis?
A: Pretty much anything you hear coming out of your speakers on our music channels I’m responsible for. As I mentioned earlier, we have teams of music programmers who are specifically responsible for certain channels. I set in essence the overall direction for those programmers and empower them to create the best radio station they can for the audience they’re trying to reach. So there really is no typical day for me—things move incredibly fast at Sirius, and depending on the day, I’m focusing on certain genres of music. I could be in a meeting with my country music programmers talking about our coverage for the CMA awards in Nashville, and an hour later, I could be brainstorming ideas with our heavy metal programmer about Lamb of God.

Q: Are there any specific channels you’ve developed that you’re particularly proud of?
A: There’s several, actually. One I’m particularly proud of is the Chill channel. The music has existed for a while—bands like Zero-7 and artists like Moby might have received airplay at various types of channels. But our Chill channel streams that genre on a nationwide basis, and I’m really proud to have put together a format that’s really, really unique but actually very accessible to a very wide audience. We actually believe Chill is still, today, ahead of its time, but it’s the future of what is referred to as adult contemporary radio.