Twenty-five years ago on September 25, 2001, XM Satellite Radio went on the air in Dallas–Fort Worth and San Diego. Every launch plan we had built said September 12, 2001. So did the retail calendars, the floor sets and the launch advertising we had already bought.
We never used any of it.
On September 11, 2001, we were one day out from the biggest launch of our careers. That afternoon it did not matter, and neither did anything else we had been working on for three years. We had two satellites in orbit, fully paid for, broadcasting to nobody. For weeks afterward I did not know whether anyone would still care about satellite radio at all.
What we could not do was wait. A satellite business burns the same money whether or not it has a single subscriber, so we gave ourselves about a week to rebuild a retail launch plan that had taken three years to design. New date, new tone, new advertising, new everything. Nothing in our original plans belonged in the country we woke up in after September 11. Within one week we had worked out a new plan with our retail partners, built around a September 25 date.
We could not have done it alone, and this is the part of the story the consumer electronics retail industry should take credit for. Best Buy, the regional chains and the car audio specialists rebuilt their plans around us on a few days’ notice. They held floor space for a new, unproven product in a quarter when Americans were not shopping for much of anything. They retrained staff on a new pitch. They pushed a category that did not exist yet. Retail partners take a bet like that maybe once in a decade, and ours took it in the worst month any of us had ever worked through.
Even with all that behind us, the hardest thing was still ahead for all of us. Radio had been free in America since 1920. Free was not a price point; it was an expectation three generations deep. We were asking people to pay $9.99 a month for a better radio experience.
That argument is where my book gets its name. When I tried to explain to my mother what I was actually selling, she said, “No one is going to pay for radio. Radio is free.” I thought about that and replied, “You pay for bottled water.” Nobody in 1920 would have paid for water either. I called the book They Pay for Water because that was the entire bet: what people get for free, they will pay for when you make it meaningfully better.
They paid. The category we launched in the fall of 2001 grew into one of the largest sources of audio entertainment in the United States, and the subscription sitting in tens of millions of dashboards today traces back to a launch plan that was written in a week by people who were not sure anyone was still listening.
They said nobody would ever pay for radio.
Availability in Audio & Print
They Pay For Water is now available worldwide on Spotify, Apple, Kobo/Walmart and Storytel, with additional retailers launching over the coming weeks. It arrives weeks after the twenty-fifth anniversary of XM’s commercial launch on September 25, 2001.
“It has been a fun chapter in many respects,” said Murphy, one of XM’s founding executives, “and I am thrilled with the response so far to this wonderful story and adventure of launching a new media company.”
They Pay for Water follows XM from a paper concept through the launch of a national satellite network to millions of paying subscribers. Murphy was there for the whole decade, and the book covers the engineering, the retail rollout, the subscriber economics, and the decisions made under pressure that are rarely written
down anywhere else.
The audiobook is narrated by Albert Wallace and runs six hours and thirty minutes. Free samples are available on several platforms, including Spotify at open.spotify.com/show/18G5cndMXLb2zpfNAVN9oX.
The book is available in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions from Amazon and other retailers worldwide.
About the Author
Dan Murphy was a founding executive at XM Satellite Radio, where he spent 10 years working on business development, satellite development, radio design and distribution. He is the author of They Pay for Water: Building XM Satellite Radio from a Paper Concept to Millions of Subscribers (2026), the first insider account of the satellite radio build-out. Available on Amazon. [email protected].
See also: Nora Gomez On Human Intelligence, AI And The Future Of Retail
