The inside story of the launch of Satellite Radio industry and the challenges to stay alive as a start-up.
Miami Beach, FL August 18, 2026 –(PR.com)– Twenty-Five Years After 9/11 Postponed Its Launch, the Inside Story of XM Satellite Radio
They Pay for Water, by founding XM executive Dan Murphy, is on sale now at Amazon in ebook, paperback and hardcover.
XM Satellite Radio was scheduled to begin the first satellite radio broadcasts in the United States on September 12, 2001, in Dallas/Fort Worth and San Diego. The executive team flew out of Washington, D.C. in the early morning hours of September 11. The launch was postponed, going live on September 25 and reaching the rest of the country by November.
This September marks twenty-five years since that week. They Pay for Water, by Dan Murphy, one of the founding executives who built XM, is the first inside account of what that decade looked like from within the company.
Murphy joined Sony at twenty-four with a year and a half of work experience. Fifteen years later he was helping raise the capital, build and launch the satellites, design the radios, and fight for retail shelf space and factory-installed placement in cars — all in service of a proposition that had never worked in America: persuading people to pay for radio.
“After Walkman, Discman, I was looking to join the next big audio innovation when a recruiter called,” Murphy said. “It sounded perfect. It was going to be radio the way it should be.”
The book covers the capital raises, the satellite program, the retail and automotive distribution fights, the programming and celebrity battles, the churn and acquisition-cost economics that governed every real decision, the many Chapter 11 scares, and the merger with Sirius that ended XM as an independent company.
“We had spent years getting ready for the biggest launch of our careers, and then the country stopped,” Murphy said. “For weeks afterward, I did not know whether anyone would still care about satellite radio.”
Written as part industry history and part personal memoir, it is aimed at readers interested in how a capital-intensive consumer business gets built, and at an audio industry now debating subscription economics that XM worked out the hard way two decades earlier.
They Pay for Water: Building XM Satellite Radio from a Paper Concept to Millions of Subscribers went on sale August 17, 2026. It is 268 pages and is available now on Amazon in ebook, paperback and hardcover.
Buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HFCVW6JG
About the author — Dan Murphy was one of the founding executives of XM Satellite Radio, from the company’s earliest days through its merger with Sirius. They Pay for Water is his first book.
Contact: Dan Murphy · danmurphy.direct@gmail.com
Contact Information:
Dan Murphy
Daniel M Murphy
202-257-7695
Contact via Email
Read the full story here: https://www.pr.com/press-release/976668
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