First community-run Sirius XM stations announced

One of the conditions put into the 2008 merger of satellite radio companies Sirius and XM by the Federal Communications Commission was that the merged company had to allow unaffiliated third parties to lease channels on a long-term basis (.PDF here). On Monday, nearly four years after the merger was first announced, the FCC announced the condition has been implemented at Sirius XM, and listed the first third-party lessees.

The first stations involved in the program are by no means commercial in nature and instead are geared toward providing programming for a very specific audience:

• Howard University will have four stations of music and talk programming aimed at the African American community and content coming from Historically Black Colleges and Universities
• Brigham Young University will have a music and talk station for the Mormon community
• Eventus/National Latino Broadcasting will have two Spanish language stations: one for music, and one for talk.
• WorldBand Media will have a Spanish language talk station
• KTV will have a Korean language music and talk station

The FCC says leased stations will comprise four percent of all of the 24-hour audio stations on Sirius and XM, Forty-six different entities applied to be Sirius XM lessees when the program opened for submissions last year.