The District loses a great company and great people in XM Radio's purge

From the Washington Post:

Nobody has announced anything yet, but about 80 Washington-based XM employees, including many of the on-air voices and program directors of the service's most popular music channels, have learned this week that today is their last day of employment. They found out in the worst possible way: One worker routinely signed on to the company's payroll system and saw that his final day of employment was listed as October 15. Word spread like a virus through the building and by the time everyone had checked the system, it was clear that Sirius boss Mel Karmazin was ready with his bloodletting.

There's no word yet on the future of XM's headquarters building at New York and Florida avenues NE in NoMa, but it's hard to imagine that Sirius will hold on to an emptied-out building for long. Karmazin's plan, according to several radio industry news outlets, is to merge XM and Sirius programming into one stream on or around Nov. 5--directly in opposition to Karmazin's repeated and vehement promises to keep the two voices separate and distinct for some time to come.

This sucks. Big time. It goes without saying that notifying your people this way is awful, but beyond that, this is just a poor call. I know a lot of people at XM Radio, and they were great for music, great for Washington DC, and above all else, great people. The XM building is truly incredible - one of the most beautiful music buildings I've ever been in.

Tobi and Billy Zero at XMU were early supporters of Soft Complex, and were wonderful to put our EP into rotation on Channel 43. Gavin at In-DEED played some of our remixes. I know from conversations with other artists and friends that XM helped many, many musicians reach audiences and parts of the country that they would never have been able to reach before. The staff was always supportive of local music and local musicians. My personal thanks and thoughts go out to everyone impacted, and more specifically to Tobi, Gavin and Billy to being such steadfast supporters of the scene here in DC.

This is a great loss for our music community and the DC community as a whole. Ugh.