There might be a good reason for pay radio, but I haven't found one good enough for me yet.
My scan button finds free radio pretty easily. Cross country it's pretty easy to pick up Rush, Hannity, local talk guys, and music is way to easy to get.
Mostly, though, I travel no more than an hour in either direction from home.
Why pay for radio when I know all the free channels?
You probably drive in the right part(s) of the country -- and your one-hour radius may mean you don't drive long distances in rural areas.
In the last five years, I've had three clients whose "problems" required me to drive 250+ miles (each way) from the metro Southeast to rural parts of the Southeast twice or more a month for over a year at a time. I drive because anything under four to five hours is often quicker than flying to small airports these days -- considering my drive to the airport, parking, unpredictible security lines, flight delays, luggage waits, rental car waits, etc. I can also drive on my schedule, not the airlines' schedule.
I also have a son in college in northern Virginia, almost 600 miles away, and make that drive a few times a year (back to school, the school's formal family weekend in the fall, a family basketball weekend in February, end of year, etc.).
In these cases, there are stretches of almost 100 miles where I can't get talk radio, news, or sports. The trip to Virginia? Good radio less than 150 of the 600 miles. Even for good music, I have to fiddle with the radio every twenty-five miles or so.
With XM, I set it on Fox News, conservative talk, 24-hour MLB, ACC sports, clean humor, BBC news, the Discovery Channel (in the old days), and can drive the entire trip with no static, better-than-CD-quality sound (my XM is built into the radio), and without searching for channels.
From my driving experience in west Texas and parts of Arizona and New Mexico, I had the same problem finding and keeping stations.
I also have a 45-minute to one hour commute each day and, among other things, XM has a 24-hour traffic and weather station for my city.
So, for some people, it's worth it -- I spend more time listening to XM than watching TV, and it's a lot cheaper than cable TV.