I’ve been with Sirius for going on 4 years now. I got it when I first bought my car in Februrary 2008 because I hated listening to the constant rambling and useless babbling of local radio; I haven’t listened to local radio in years. My service has always been $12.95 a month since I started in 2008 however Sirius started nickel and diming small fees which the bill eventually became bloated.
When I first started with Sirius, my bill was $12.95 a month with only $.65 cents in taxes so I was only paying $13.60 a month. It was so affordable in 2009 when I heard of their Internet radio for $2.99 a month, I even signed up for that and changed to the bill every 3 months plan. But then in 2010, Sirius started adding on something called a Royalty fee for $1.98 a month. According to Sirius, the U.S. Music Royalty Fee is a fee that SiriusXM is required by law to pay copyright music royalties. (meh) Guess they couldn’t scrunch that all in the $12.95? But anyways I sucked it up and paid that too so then my bill bloated to $18.57 a month which I was paying on a tri-monthly basis. Then … I felt that I was paying too much and dropped the Internet radio subscription which brought my bill down to about $15.75 a month and thats what I’ve been paying ever since. And now just last week I got a letter in the mail from Sirius saying they want to tack on another $1.54 “to continue bringing this unbeatable listening experience to our subscribers”. Me pay $17.29 a month JUST for the radio service, that doesnt even include Internet radio and I really only listen to 5 stations because the other 160 channels I have flat out suck? No thanks. I’ll be cancelling my service on December 31st 2011 at 11:59:59 PM after 4 years of loyal service.
Pretty soon I’ll be left with no form of entertainment. Netflix went up to $17 from the $8.99 I was paying and now so I scrapped it. Sirius is going up to $17.29 from the $15.75 I was already pushing my limit of what I wanted to pay in the first place on an amenity. I guess next I will be getting rid of my Vonage service as they seem to be creeping up in price too. Despite me having the $9.99 package with them that I used to pay only $12.45 for with fees, now I pay $15 for service because 50% of my bill are taxes, fees, surcharges and all types of other nonsense. After some time I think all the cheap Internet based services will be a thing of the past as they raise their prices only to take the places of the current land-line crap we have now. Heck, even my .com domains went up for 2012 so I’m having to cut some of those and decrease my services on those as well. And they wonder why people bootleg and pirate? Maybe because the services cost more than what they are worth perhaps?
Oh well … back to downloading my music and stashing CDs in my car. All is not lost tho, I can still stream my thousands of Google Music from my Android phone and listen to that through the line in port in my car for free (for now).