The June NPD Group satellite radio sales results are in - and while there's some continued decline with flat year-over-year retail growth overall, Sirius' retail growth was actually up from the year before.

Retail sales for the satellite radio industry as a whole were up only 0.3% YoY in June - that's down from 6% in May, 9% in April and a whoppin' 26% in March.

Sirius Satellite Radio's growth on the otherhand was up 18% YoY in June - down from 23% in May, and 54% in April. 

XM didn't fair so well. XM Satellite Radio's year-over-year growth was down 18% in June - with an 8% decline in May, and down 20% in April.

Is the overall satellite radio weakness in retail an industry problem? Or does the blame soley on XM shoulders?

"Too hard to tell, and probably a little of both – especially with signs of a weakening consumer.  However, XM did suffer product shortages to the company’s decision to correct the FM modulator issue.  SIRI decided to wait until the end of the quarter to deal with this issue in the “dead of the summer” (despite having publicly stated that they had taken care of the problem at the end of May)," said Jonathan A Jacoby in a recent Bank of America recent report.

These numbers don't come as much of surprise considering we already saw subscriber numbers earlier this month.

SIRIUS Satellite Radio will release their second quarter 2006 financial and operating results on Tuesday, August 1, 2006. SIRIUS will hold a conference call at 8:00 am ET to discuss these results.

You can listen to the conference call online here, or on SIRIUS Satellite Radio by tuning to SIRIUS channel 125.

...so says Jim Cramer in his infinite wisdom. See, according to Cramer (who, for some reason, I actually used to respect) the satellite radio industry needs to have one and only one player in it. As a result, Sirius will emerge as the superior of the two and either: a) buyout XM or b) XM will go the way of AOL and diminish to nothingness.

Cramer. You sir, are an idiot.

Enough with the silly merger talk already. It's almost as tiresome as reading the hacky "Sirius-ly" tag in every newspaper headline. I've already ranted about why it wouldn't be a good idea, but to throw salt on the wound - Mel himself even stated that a merger was out of the question (that's right folks, the Reuters spin-machine was turned to high - gasp!).

Maybe a better way to look at this would be from one of Cramer's collegue's standpoint. In a duopoly, the natural order of things is for marketshare to gravitate to 50/50. Sirius has gained massive subscribers to bring itself to 40% marketshare in a very short amount of time.

Phenominal work, and it's obvious now that the move to sign on Howard Stern was a very smart one (a move made by Joe Clayton btw, not Mel).

But another thing to take into account is that with a higher subscriber base, comes higher absolute churn. "Net subscribers" can be a misleading number - I'd like to see GROSS subscribers as a form of gauging growth. I'm not diminishing Sirius' success (far from it), just saying that things are more complicated than "mine is bigger than yours" comparisons. Sirius' success doesn't spell the doom of XM, and it sure as hell doesn't mean that a merger is imminent.

So either Cramer is smoking something, or he's looking for attention by waxing poetically about mergers, or perhaps - he just doesn't get it. You decide.

SIRIUS Satellite Radio has just announced that they have added 600,460 subscribers for the second quarter of 2006, bringing the total amount of Sirius subscribers to 4,678,207. That's 64% higher than last year's second quarter subscriber additions.

Wow. This beats analysts' estimates hands down.