I can’t find any credible news source to back this information up so I hesitantly am putting in the “news” category, but please keep that in mind before getting too excited. This morning a Sirius employee told me, a Sirius customer, that regulatory approval of the Sirius + XM merger has been approved. It’s especially interesting how the discussion came up because it was totally unrelated to what the call was about.

You can hear our discussion below and to be clear I didn’t receive a vague confirmation, I received several confirmations of this being a fact during the call. Listen and judge for yourself. It is possible this is just one misinformed employee, especially since no news sources are carrying the news, but is it possible they know something internally that the rest of the world does not?

The call took place within the last hour and I informed Matthew the call was being recorded. Sirius also records calls with their customers so they have a record as well. I edited out the non-relevant portions of the call before and after the merger approval discussion in the audio below, but I do have a complete recording from beginning to end. I uploaded the edited recording to my Utterz account as well.

Note: not only does Sirius employee Matthew confirm the regulatory approval but provides additional details about the merger that I couldn’t find anywhere else including siriusmerger.com. Was Matthew just making this up, being overconfident, misinterpreting some internal Sirius information or is this true?

Update December 19, 2007 8:25pm PST: Received a few questions about the authenticity of this recording because it “sounds too good to be a telephone call.” Now that’s funny. I did expect people to question whether the employee knew what he was talking about but didn’t expect people to say the recording itself was staged.

This is not a staged call. It was recorded through Skype — the VoIP client I’ve used in business for several years now (see many posts about this at this blog) — using the Pamela for Skype commercial plugin and that explains the call clarity. You don’t hear normal audio artifacts when recording this way.

As I said in the original post, I have the entire (7+ minute) call where I was complaining about an unrelated issue and would be more than happy to make this recording available unedited to accredited members of the news media that want to listen to the entire unedited call and fact check from there.

Also, if enough people are interested (leave comments below if you are) I’d be willing to post the entire call but would beep out my customer account number with Sirius which is nobody’s business but Sirius and mine. For verification purposes however, I would be willing to share the unedited call which contains my customer account number for any member of the press that I can first verify their identity (and ascertain that this account information will not be made public).

The information the employee shared with me in the call could be bogus, I’m fully admitting that both now and when I published the original post but the call itself is authentic and not staged. If you see somebody claim the call is staged then they are full of, well, you know what. I’ve been writing and publishing online for many years (check for yourself) and will put my reputation behind this recording being authentic. If it was a hoax I would have put it in the “humor” category.

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