
Photo: “BillyJoel17” flickr photo by jeaneeem https://flickr.com/photos/jeaneeem/3069233509 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
On January 15th 2016, the Billy Joel SiriusXM Radio Channel will return to SiriusXM Satellite Radio. Billy Joel previously had a channel on the Satellite radio station back in 2014. It has been almost twenty five years since Billy Joel has released a new album of music. However, Billy Joel’s popularity continues to newly register with young fans daily. His core base of fans who grew up with his music in the seventies and eighties continues to stay loyal to the singer. Billy Joel has continued to sell out concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City on a monthly basis. There seems to be no end in sight to his current residency at Madison Square Garden as the demand for tickets always exceeds the supply of seats. One may ask how an artist who has released very little materiel in twenty five years can still stay so popular. The answer is simple, a great body of work that is simply timeless.
For fans who can not attend the Madison Square Garden shows, SiriusXM radio will serve as an alternate experience to the music of Billy Joel and the rarities he has been performing at Madison Square Garden. According to Billy Joel , the channel will serve as an arena in which Billy Joel will guest DJ at times. While as a guest DJ the Billy Joel SiriusXM Billy Joel Channel, the legendary singer will play many of the songs by other artists that inspired him as a musician. Hopefully,the SiriusXM channel will feature excerpts from the Master Classes that Billy Joel participated in at college universities over the past twenty years. The River of Dream special Australian tour edition 3 CD issue featured a disk that contained the lectures and performances of Billy Joel’s lectures. They were fascinating, funny and historically accurate lectures of nineteen sixties and seventies pop culture. Simply having access to some of those lecture performances will make listening to the Billy Joel SiriusXM channel well worth listening to.
The Billy Joel SiriusXM Channel is due to begin broadcasting in a limited run on January 15th 2016 and last until February 15th 2016. Many of the Sirius XM radio channels such as the Bruce Springsteen channel also began as limited runs. However, the Springsteen channel proved to be so popular that SiriusXM scheduled it as a permanent channel. The Grateful Dead, Elvis Presley, and Pearl Jam all have their own channels at the current time. Hopefully the Billy Joel channel proves to be as popular as the Bruce Springsteen Channel so that its run is extended beyond the June 2016 date.