Sooner than you think.......how about NOW? Sirius and XM Satellite Radio are $13.95 and $9.95 monthly. If the FCC successfully migrates the Radio spectrum to Digital as they are doing with Commercial Over The Air TV, subscription-based radio services could be the norm of the future.
And if you're curious, the signal quality and programming on both XM and Sirius are superior to analog AM/FM commercial radio, IMO (though Sirius signal quality is not up to the standards of XM currently - you get a lot of drop outs when driving)....but here is something you won't know unless you become a subscriber (this example being from XM):
Each reciever is coded with a unique ID and you need to initialize it to start decoding the signal. Okay, that's a pain but you only need do it once. Here is the kicker - when you stop the subscription it takes less than four minutes for them to cut off service to the particular reciever you unsubscribed. Connect a few dots and it's not hard to figure out that someone like XM knows what signal is being listened to where and by whom. In fact, user stats are collected by XM just like your ISP could keep a roster of URLs you visit.
The RIAA would love for all radio to be subscription based but "free" radio has a behemoth known as Clear Channel that isn't going to want to re-engineer each station it owns.
This is not going to happen. Just as broadcast (over-the-air) TV was not taken away when cable and satellite TV came along, likewise broadcast radio is not going to go away just because satellite radio may eventually achieve a certain level of popularity. And in the same fashion, the move to digital television has not, and is not going to, lead to the end of free broadcast TV. All it means is that your local TV stations will be broadcasting on different frequencies than before.
Each reciever is coded with a unique ID and you need to initialize it to start decoding the signal. Okay, that's a pain but you only need do it once. Here is the kicker - when you stop the subscription it takes less than four minutes for them to cut off service to the particular reciever you unsubscribed. Connect a few dots and it's not hard to figure out that someone like XM knows what signal is being listened to where and by whom. In fact, user stats are collected by XM just like your ISP could keep a roster of URLs you visit.
You're connecting dots that aren't there. These are radio receivers. They RECEIVE. Just as they receive the signals that are turned into the various audio channels, they can also receive the inaudible signals from the company that tells them to start or stop working depending on whether or not you pay your bill. They cannot, however, transmit back. And transmitting back is the only way XM or Sirius could find out what station you're listening to at a given time. They can't even tell if your radio is on.