The other day to prevent a young one from replaying the same soundtrack over and over via youtube - (bandwidth repeatedly counting against and lots of ads for the same repeated songs oh my) - I just popped over to amazon and bought the album and popped it onto a usb stick for them.
I picked up a couple of gift cards for their bday this week - one of them was a google play card - then I remembered G killed the music section of the play store, so I put it back and got an amazon card instead.
that premium would be a great deal if we had one more in the household here. we've got three chromecasts - two with the google tv - but not the gtv plan - sheesh the ads via youtube with that are a drain, and I wonder about the compression for music - but they still use them for convenience and the other things like discovery+ which is affordable.
Oh if only they would plex-like into a win7 box on the network and pull my collection of mp3s.
Maybe all this is going in a good direction. Fingers crossed.
In addition, a flat fee could lead to a slow on googles growth, as once a users pays, they can not find new ways to monetize that user.
Don't get me wrong, I love the option to pay a fee to opt out of certain ads. It really helps align the incentives of the user with the company, but unfortunately it would have to be expensive to average out the more lucrative ads.
Get me started on the ads that come with play store apps and "free games".
however at $12/month that would be $864 per year to help them. I would jump at $60 / year for 6 people.. heck that would save me on comcast overages several months of the year.
We still pay for some searches by paying the ad costs of the places we spend money, but that's another thing to figure.. $120 / year for search? I doubt my clicks amount to that for any advertiser. I'd pay 20 for ad free, zero tracking searches, but not 100.