AOL Radio Featuring XM Radio is FREE!

Imagine my surprise when I was doing a bit of digging into online radio stations to realize that while Sirius Satellite Radio Online charges for their service unless you happen to be a paid subscriber to their regular service, at a pricey $12.95 a month, XM Radio is free in partnership with AOL Radio. XM does charge for their full featured online service, but their service that is bundled together with AOL Radio has a free version and comes with enough channels to keep you in listening pleasure day in and out.

Moreover, for the record, no pun intended, you do not have to be a paid member of AOL either. If you are, you do receive more stations in addition to those you would get in the free version, but as I stated, the free version offers up quite a varied selection of music channels. For example, when I was browsing, I was interested in finding holiday music to listen to, and was pleased to see that I had several choices to choose from, including a country holiday channel, rock holiday channel, classic holiday channel, jazz holiday channel, an oldies holiday channel, and several others. These are of course in addition to a full selection of channels including country, rock, hip-hop, Christian, metal, news, sports, talk, and many, many more.

The AOL Radio featuring XM interface is easy to get up and running and easy to navigate, though you do need high-speed Internet access. When I first tried to access it, I did run into an issue with with my pop-up blocker and a request by my virus protection to let an Active X control run. After approving the Active X control, and turning my pop-up blocker off just for the radio station page, and allowing a small download from AOL, I was up and running.