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SiriusXM announced on Monday, August 5 that starting Thursday, August 15, Kids Place Live (KPL) would move “down” the dial from Channel 78 to Channel 355. That meant the majority of vehicles would no longer receive the station. KPL would be restricted to computers and devices with streaming audio.
I got bored with Sesame Street and the Wiggles pretty early on when my son Ben was a toddler. Luckily there was SiriusXM’s Kids Place Live, which was an oasis in the desert. We heard dozens, if not hundreds of new artists. And as soon as Ben was able to tell me his favorites, I was able to purchase and download specific songs and CDs (which generated revenue for those musicians).
By the time Ben was five, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the “standard” kids music stuff that was promoted by his education programs-including Sesame Street and Barney (shudder). But he would also break into songs that his friends and classmates didn’t know. Every year, we’d compile CDs of original children’s music and distribute it to his friends for his birthday. That became a quarterly occurrence with the amount of music he consumed.
SiriusXM ostensibly has THREE stations for children, but two of them don’t really count. Kidz Bop is reworked versions of adult songs with the lyrics “dumbed down.” And Radio Disney is mostly the same pop tunes you can hear on dozens of their other channels, but with a heavier emphasis on artists discovered or signed to Disney labels.
