After buying an XM enabled car from a dealership, I was extremely disappointed when I started receiving weekly mailings and phone calls from them as my "trial" was expiring.

I am still pissed off about the lengths I had to go to in order to stop receiving communications from them. They refused to remove my contact information from their system and could not promise I wouldn't be contacted again in the future. I had to ultimately change all of my contact information to false information, fortunately the guy I was talking to was sympathetic to my plight and had no objections testing out the system to see what BS info it would take.

The whole escapade landed them on my short list of companies I will never do business with ever again.

Sirius and Onstar are two of the worst things about my car purchase. I wonder the degree to which these partnerships hurt these car brands for short term profit.

Things I want in an OEM receiver: 1) Carplay/Android Auto, 2) Software updates for 1, 3) Radio, 4) To never do anything else (call me, install bloatware apps, reorder menus, etc).

> Sirius and Onstar are two of the worst things about my car purchase. I wonder the degree to which these partnerships hurt these car brands for short term profit.

Well, you're stuck with the car by the time this kicks in...

And, apparently, the OnStar experience has just recently (<12 months) gotten quite horrific--apparently it used to be an online thing but that wasn't intrusive enough. I made the salesman sit with me while I was signing up (Okay, you want your commission from this, you get to spend your time.). Verbally. Over a shitty, high-latency, low bandwidth voice connection.

The salesman sat there visibly appalled. The salesmen got his manager. The manager got somebody else. etc. By the time I was done, I had 7 different people from the dealership listening with shock on their faces.

Big manager: "Ummm, yeah, this is a problem. We are strongly encouraging our customers sign up for something that makes them angry. That's ... not good."

Apparently, nobody at the dealership had experienced a signup in the last 12 months.

> Sirius and Onstar are two of the worst things about my car purchase

I'd say your car purchase was an awesome experience.

You don't know enough about OnStar, then.

My experience was similar. I think I blocked the phone number they called from, and that seems to have been effective.

Unfortunately, though not a subscriber, my car stereo often defaults to the Sirius input when I start it. This mean I'm greeted with Sirius ads when I start my car. Usually, this ad literally consists of playing a really annoying buzzing/screeching sound, followed by someone explaining that if you subscribe, you won't have to listen to that sound. That's an .. interesting .. strategy.

I told them I sold my car, they stopped calling after that. It was still annoying.

I discussed that option with the person I talked to on the phone and that doesn't stop mail solicitations or prevent them from contacting you in the future.

I got the mailings (though not phone calls) when I recently bought a used car with a SiriusXM radio (2012 model), though they stopped completely by about two weeks after the trial period ended. They may as well have not bothered, since the car didn't have a nav system built in so I was piping all the audio from my phone anyway.

Bought a car with free SiriusXM subscription. I listened to a few stations a number of times - pretty good selection, but really didn't use it much. After the trial period, started getting calls from them. I (regretfully) accepted a discounted rate to extend my trial, but I had refused to accept any subscription that auto-renews. (Only later would I find out the salesperson outright lied to me that they were offering me a one-time subscription). The extended period eventually expired, and they billed me for another subscription at a higher rate. Since I never ultimately listened to anything, I never realized it was still active. By the time that one expired, that particular card had been closed, and they started mailing me past due notices. Which is when I discovered they'd continued billing me. I was irate and called their customer service at least a dozen times, every time getting a different runaround. On most of those calls, the runaround was to transfer me to a menu system that went nowhere. I fired off a letter to them, then just gave up, refusing to pay. The past due notices eventually ended up at a collection agency, and I had a couple interactions with them until I discovered the magic word "fraud". I sent the collector a letter explaining how Sirius had charged me for something I never asked for, which is fraud. It literally took years, but finally I got Sirius off my back. I am definitely uninstalling the several instances of Pandora we have.

My experience is that Spotify's Daily Mix playlists are actually remarkably good "radio stations"! I get up to 6 different "stations", they keep generating random new tracks the longer you listen, and they do a reasonably good job of segmenting the different styles of music I enjoy. The naming is wonky but I think the Daily Mixes are a much better "radio" than the actually-named-radio feature in Spotify.

And they automatically rotate and update based on your listening!

Yeah, they're great, but I wish they had some knobs to twiddle - like how often to play new stuff vs stuff I've played. It's a bit too easy to create feedback loops. Like say I'm trying to learn a song on guitar and play a song say 5 or 6 times. Now in my Daily Mix stations that'll be the ONLY song by that artist that they play.

Sirius also has almost all major sports and a decent amount of non-music content. I like having it built into my car vs needing to deal with bluetooth, lag, and the various interruptions that my mobile likes to make.

> I think Sirus only makes money off the folks who forget to cancel after the promotional period. It’s like $20 a month and I’ve forgot to do it my self for a couple months.

they don't really have an ongoing per-customer costs, right?

so long as they extract the all the money you're willing to pay them, be it $20 or $90, that's fine. i expect they worry more about total customer count.

Audible has a similar ridiculous thing going on. At any point you can cancel your $15 a month subscription and they will ask if you want to pay $7 instead. Anyone with this knowledge can easily get the service for $7 forever. Or you can start infinite trials and get infinite free books.

Can you explain I more detail how I can get cheaper audible?

Go through the cancellation flow on the website. You’ll be offered a coupon before the final step.

They probably have per user pricing with some of the content sources so there would be some cost.

There is also the cost of having a call center contact deal with the renewal every 6 months. 20 min on the phone costs at least a couple bucks.

It took me only 10 minutes to cancel a SiriusXM account I had for over 5 years.

The webapp was unusable and Howard Stern is now boring to me.

I went with a Pandora-ish/Spotify-ish service named Slacker Radio, which costs only $2.50/mo pro-rated, has a 320k bit-rate and is commercial free.

SiriusXM may need Pandora to survive in the future. Pandora/SiriusXM can be re-worked to compete with Spotify.