Sirius XM prices

My introductory price year of Sirius XM which cost me slightly over $100 is coming to an end. To renew the package will cost me $204.88. I like the service, but I don’t know if I like it enough to pay that much. Then again, the car has it built in, so I guess it’s silly not to get it, and I can afford it. I just think it’s overpriced.

Has anyone had any luck negotiating better deals with them? If so, how did you do it?

It’s silly to pay for a service just because your radio has the circuitry, IMHO. You can also afford to send me $200 annually, but that doesn’t mean you will.

My Honda has the ability. I gave up on the service after about six months.I feel no loss or sense that I am failing to get full value from the radio.

I waited them out, and they eventually offered me a year of service for about $75. I still didn’t take it.

I was able to re-up on a 2 month trial recently when I was taking a cross-country road trip (the trial sub had been lapsed for a little over 2 years at that point). Found out I really didn’t need it, even then.

I got it with my new car purchase and my introductory free year ends in March. I definitely like its selections and being able to listen to a station over hundreds of miles on a long road trip. While I can afford it at $200 a year, wow and ouch that just seems like a lot of money.

I used to get the service for 50% off annually (threatened to cancel each time for renewal). I now take the $25 for 5 months each time I speak with retentions. Can’t live without my Alt Nation…

I dropped it a long time ago (after I got a smartphone, basically). With Pandora and other “radio” apps (now I primarily use Spotify) I really didn’t need it for any price, let alone what they wanted for it. The only thing I listened to anyway was The Verge, which turns out is pretty much exactly CBC Radio 3 (which, of course, streams on the web), so bye bye. I did really like it, but only during the year or two between when I got it and when technology passed it by. I also had XM, and never got over the merger with Sirius. I liked XM, and things (prices, packages/channel offerings, # of stations with commercials, inane blabbering DJs, or whatever) seemed to go to shit after the merger.

We’ve had other threads about sat radio. My objection was that in a few short months, I realized that most of the channels have playlists no longer than your average classic rock FM broadcaster, and it’s tiresome to pay for a recycling list of the same-old… even if it’s a niche or genre not well-covered on broadcast radio.

Buy an MP3-capable sound unit or an aux link for your smartphone, and run your own “channel” of music you like, rather than pay for a slightly flaky service with five hundred channels you’ll never listen to and five you’ll get tired of.

(My breaking point was the Jimmy Buffett channel, which plays 90% the same dozen songs you can hear in a week of radio listening… just one concert or live variation or another of them each time. Whoopie. The man has a thousand songs on record, and hearing one rarity a day doesn’t justify listening to yet one more effing take on a duet version of “Margaritaville.” While paying for the privilege. Even the comedy channels run a short playlist at any one time and the third time you’ve heard a Jeff Dunham routine it’s more than enough.)

Their never-ending hard sell gets tiring, too. It’s like trying to leave Scientology.

The repetition drives me absolutely nuts!! I mentioned in another thread, if I hear Tin Man or Deacon Blue one more time, I may have to hurt someone! Same deal on the comedy channels. The only advantage for us is that we live in a county with crappy reception for all but a few stations. We don’t have smart phones either, so that’s not an option.

Dunno when the bill comes due again, but if they don’t cut us a deal, we won’t be renewing.

WRT the comedy stations, normally I listen to them non-stop for a few months and then take about a year off so that when I go back it’s all new material.

I like the service, but it goes up each and every year. This year I’m going to try to remember to do what everyone here on the board has been saying and call up right before it renews and whine about how expensive it is. I’ll also look back and see how much it was when I first started the service. I expect that it’s roughly doubled. Of course, it seems everyone gets their own price that has nothing to do with anything. In this thread alone I think I saw $75/yr and $60/yr (25 for 5 months), but I’m paying, what, like $175 a year or something.

On top of that, they’re customer service is a nightmare to deal with. They sound like they’re based in Vietnam, they don’t understand me, I don’t understand them. I end up with extra charges that I have to call back to have fixed. ugh.

Unlike many here, I like XM and have been a subscriber for several years. I agree with most about the music seletion; I am far more likely to use my phone for music than XM; however, I do like the following:

Sports: The big draw here is live sports. I like having every MLB game available, every NBA game, and most college football and basketball games that I would care about. Also, all NFL games, depending on how much you want to pay. If you like sports talk, there are also 3 or 4 decent stations.

Public Radio: Multiple public radio stations mean I don’t need to hunt around the far left of the dial whenever I go into a different city. Plus there are multiple options (NPR, XM Public Radio, BBC, etc.)

Radio Classics: OK, I don’t listen to this one a whole lot, so for all I know it may have a short play list, like the music channels, but when I am going on a long drive, sometimes I will listen to radio from the 40s and 50s. If there are some good detective shows or Westerns on (Dragnet, Johnny Dollar, Gunsmoke, Sherlock Holmes, etc.) it is a good way to make 3 or 4 hours go by quickly. On the other hand, if there is a variety show on, I’ll quickly change the channel (sorry Jack Benny and Charlie McCarthy). Then there are some shows that I an take 30 minutes of, but if they are running a marathon, I will not last long (Our Miss Brooks).

I don’t spend a lot of time listening to the music, comedy, shock jock, Oprah radio, Catholic radio, etc., etc., but I like the stuff I listen to, and I don’t pay $200 a year. I get a package without the NFL (I don’t travel on Sunday much) and I pay around $100 a year. It is well worth it to me.

Just went online and looked at my account. All said and done (base cost, fees, taxes etc), I’m paying $198 a year.
I pulled up the chat window and asked for a lower rate and they guy said no so quick I’m fairly sure it was a C&P answer (along with suggesting a lesser package as well).

I called XM then (and they must have gotten rid of their call center in Asia). Asked the same question, got the same answer “Nope, can’t do anything, how about one of the other packages”. When I mentioned that it’s probably going to go up again when it renews in April he said I was right, it would (to $216). I told him I’d probably be calling back to cancel then. As soon as I said that he offered to transfer me to the retention department to handle the cancellation. My plan was to cancel, wait to get flooded with offers in the mail* and take one of those, but instead, upon pleading my case to her, she offered me a deal at $107.50/yr (that’ll renew at current rates). She cancelled my current plan, credited the unused portion to my account, applied the new plan and charged me $62.50 for one year starting today. So, basically, I’m now at $107.50 for a year starting today instead of $216 for a year starting in April.
I’m happy.
Then, I put a note in my calendar to call back a few days before the year is up and go through it all again so it doesn’t renew at more than double.
*A few years ago they screwed up transferring my subscription from one radio to another. The only way for them to fix it was to cancel the subscription, abandon the account and start fresh with a new online account. That was years ago and I still get at least one thing a month from XM for some special introductory rates trying to get me to turn that radio back on (I don’t have it any more). So my plan was to cancel my radio for April, but then take them up on one of these offers.

Anyways, I think I did okay for few minutes of chatting and a phone call.

I dealt with their horrible call center the other day. I chose not to renew my subscription, which ended on 2 Dec 2014. They were calling me demanding $20.38 for the service they provided me from 12/2 through whenever it was that they turned off my radio. I had to talk to three different people to make them understand that I was not paying them a nickel for something they provided without my permission or agreement.

They also offered me the 5 month “Select” package for $25.

They also have an “a la carte” plan too which is $8 a month and you can pick 50 stations, except for certain “premium” ones where you have to pay an extra 25 cents for. I haven’t found any real rhyme or reason to which stations are “premium” but none of the ones I personally like are so it works great for me. Not all radios support it, but I think most newer ones do.

Very likely, the ones SXM has to pay the provider more for, regardless of whether the content justifies it.

Regarding the sports channels, especially MLB: are there any blackout restrictions? I had to give up on MLB.com because we’re in the BoSox blackout zone and you couldn’t watch any postseason games unless you had a note from your cable provider. :smack:

Ugh. I have to deal with these jerks again to renew the XM for the wife’s car. Yeah, you can get them down to about $90 a year, but it takes about 30 minutes of negotiating with them. Fortunately, you have the trump card, that is you don’t like the service enough, you just have to be willing to actually cancel the service.

When I called to transfer my service to my new car, I had just paid the renewal so it just cost me about $12 for the one month I had used in the old car plus they gave me three months free. So I got 15 months for the price of twelve and I’m good until the end of 2015.

Every time I’ve had to transfer the service and they say “There’s a $xx transfer fee” I’ve always just asked them to waive it and they always do.

Last time, though, I asked them to waive the fee, they agreed but it still appeared on my CC statement. I called back and explained to them that the rep said she would waive the $15 transfer fee but I was still charged and asked if they could refund it. She transferred me to ‘accounting’ (which was someone back in the states it sounded like). That person explained to me that they did waive the transfer fee, but they still charged me with the activation fee. The next thing out of my mouth was “Wait, so you were going to try to charge me $30 to move my subscription from one radio to the other?”.
There’s really no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do that on the internet.
Anyways, he refunded me that $15 “for the confusion”.

It seems they could make the radio subscriptions cheaper if they had better customer support. They could probably get rid of a lot of the staff if everything wasn’t so complicated. For example, like I said, activating a subscription is something that shouldn’t involve a phone call to someone in Vietnam who’s English is so broken you’d actually consider returning the unit. You should be able to set up your account, punch in the serial number be done with it.

No blackouts for MLB. You can listen to anything, anywhere.

I let it lapse after the introduction because I only drive long trips about four times a year. The rest of the time I generally don’t drive for more than 20 minutes at a time, so I’m not really listening long enough to benefit from the variety.

They offered me dirt-cheap packages to get me to renew, but they all turned out to have something called a “licensing fee” on top of the monthly price.

You can use a free VPN service to get around internet blackout zones. The company I work for has VPNs all over the globe that allowed me to watch whatever Olympic events I wanted, from whatever broadcaster I wanted.