In 2008, many tech sites and bloggers pronounced that XM radio was dead.

Today, Sirius declared otherwise.

Mel Karmazin, CEO of SIRIUS XM Radio, announced that the company is projecting to break 20.1 million subscribers by the end of the year. It will be the first time an XM radio provider has achieved this mark and means that 2010 will net them approximately 1.3 million new subscriptions.

Despite the increased adoption of digital music downloads in the “iPod Age”, XM is still proving to be a valid option. Growth in the 2nd quarter of 2010 was triple what it was in 2009.

The question is: what is prompting people to hop on XM radio when digital downloads seemed to have won the game last year?