Late last night as I was working here on my computer I had on Soundscapes, Music Choice's new age radio station, which has lately been my choice of background music for while I'm working. All of a sudden, though, the channel completely died out on me, and I began to fear that the cable/Internet problems of the previous week were returning. However, my Internet connection still appeared as strong as ever, and a quick flip over to CNN revealed that other channels were still coming in okay. I didn't think too much about this just because I was about to go to bed anyway, so I just shut everything down and hit the hay.
Well, about a couple of hours ago I went to turn Soundscapes back on, only to find that Latin music was playing in its place and the on-screen graphics were a whole lot different than I remember them being. It turned out that our cable company had replaced Music Choice with Urge Radio overnight, without giving us any warning. (Although they were nice enough to send us a message on our cable boxes after the fact.) As a result, as I've been working here today I've been scanning up and down the dial of the new channel lineup here, learning where all the good stations are. Although there are a few good stations on here, though, there isn't a real new age station; there's a smooth jazz station, and there's a "Zen" station that plays mostly meditative music, but it's perhaps a bit too mellow for my taste in terms of background music. (I need something just a tad more active than what the Zen station is playing.) I can't say that I'm too happy with all the Viacom-branded stations they're offering (do we really need more MTV channels on cable?), but the non-branded stations seem decent enough for their genres.
I don't think it substantively matters that our cable company swapped out Music Choice with Urge; I can never say that I was that big of a fan of Music Choice, and I don't think I can say that I like Urge any less at this point. I guess what bothers me is that back when we had DirecTV here we got the Music Choice stations through there, and that's where I first got into digital radio. I can still remember back when there was literally no visual feed being broadcast on the stations, and the track data was handled through the on-screen menus on the DirecTV boxes. (I still miss how the menus on our DirecTV boxes were translucent so you could still kind of see the channel you were watching as you searched for a new one.) I suppose this is another one of those silly attachments that I've picked up for no reason whatsoever, but I still can't help but feel a little sad that I don't have Music Choice anymore, particularly as I'm guessing that with Urge's branding and Sirius and XM dominating the satellite radio market (and having footholds in the satellite TV markets), Music Choice is either going to be acquired and phased out or just outright killed soon.