"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
Fun info on the SiriusXM thing: if you cancel and wait a few months, now they’ll give you an offer for a multi-year plan for $5/mo. If you are a current customer and you have a history of threatening to cancel to get promos, supposedly they’re just giving up and locking people into the same $5-6 plan for life.
If they did this normally (or at least let you bundle radios for dirt cheap), I would’ve happily subscribed for the last 15 years.
$6/mo is solidly in “cheap enough to forget to cancel” territory. I’m not hurting financially, but after something costs more than $10/mo I start thinking “do I need this?”