Imagine my surprise when I did a little digging into radio stations to find out that while Sirius Satellite Radio Online charges for their service, unless they have paid a regular subscription for their service, at a price of $12.95 a month, XM Radio is free in partnership with AOL Radio XM charges for a full broadcast service, but its service bundled with AOL Radio has a free version and comes with enough channels to keep you listening day in and day out.
In addition, for registration, no sign, no paying member of AOL either. If you are, you get more stations besides those in the free version, but as I said, the free version offers a much more diverse selection of music channels. For example, when I was browsing, I took care to find holiday music to listen to, and I was happy to see that I had several choices. to choose from, including the country holiday channel, the rock holiday channel, the classic holiday channel, the classic holiday channel, the oldies holiday channel and many others. These are of course in addition to a full selection of channels, including country, rock, hip-hop, Christian, metal, news, sports, talk, and much, much more.
AOL Radio features an XM interface that’s easy to get up and running and easy to navigate, although you do need high-speed Internet access. When I first tried to access it, I ran into a problem with my blocker blocking and asking my husband’s protection to run active X power. After approving the active X power, and turning on the pop-up blocker to the page radio-stations just turning off, allowing a small download AOL, I’m up and running.
A small browser window that opens for AOL Radio featuring XM Radio shows you the current song that is playing, along with artist info. What I thought was an interesting feature was that when a group or artist is playing, the option to click on Buy Tickets, below the Artist, Song and Album information. When you click on it, a separate window will pop up, and if there are currently any tickets available for shows or events, you will be directed to where to buy them and show all the information.
Stations are easy to navigate by category and if you are a member of AOL, AIM, Netscape, or CompuServe, you can simply enter your name and password and listen to the station more easily, the same way you do on your car radio. Also, while listening to AOL Radio XM Radio on my PC, there is a MAC version available, although I haven’t been able to test it or find out if the features are similar to the PC version. If you run a MAC though, and are either an AOL or AIM user and are interested in Internet radio, make sure to check it out.
