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YouTube’s Most Popular Musicians Heading to SiriusXM

• Egon Kilin
• June 26th, 2014

Have you ever been driving along and thought, “You know what would make this drive even better– if I could listen to Chocolate Rain on my radio.” Well, soon, you might be able to do just that. YouTube announced this morning that it is venturing onto radio with a weekly show on SiriusXM that will feature the popular video website’s most watched and emerging musicians.

The show will be titled The YouTube 15, and will be hosted by Jenna Marbles, one of YouTube’s most popular personalities with 13 million subscribers. The radio show will debut July 11 on SiriusXM Hits 1 channel, which normally plays pop, R&B, rock and hip-hop. The idea of the show is to expose listeners to a curated selection of YouTube’s music videos, according to SiriusXM’s president Scott Greenstein. “We are excited to work with YouTube on creating The YouTube 15 and to put a spotlight on the songs and artists emerging out of the world’s largest music video platform,” said Greenstein.

Songs will be selected based on what’s trending and very popular to familiarize listeners with YouTube’s greatest hits. “Equally importantly, you are going to hear new and emerging music that many people for sure will not have heard,” Greenstein said. This also means that Android users, whom can’t have YouTube running in the background without a video stop playing, will be able to listen to some of the original music available on YouTube (as you can have the SiriusXM satellite radio app running in the background on your Android device).

Unfortunately, by the sounds of things at least, the radio show won’t include cover songs (I’d imagine they’d need a specific license for that). The show will be in a countdown format. No word on whether or not the show will include instrumental performance, but it sounds as though it will be strictly limited to the pop-stars of YouTube.