New England B.S. Thread

thanks, ill have to keep an eye out for some RI fun...

 

best offer I have gotten recently is a buck a week, I tend to subscribe for summer travel, and then forget to drop it until they hit me with one over priced month.

 

They offered me $60 for a year all in (something like $48 before taxes and fees). Sounds about the same.

My friend let his cancel than eventually got the $99/3 year offer. Not sure if it was email or mail.

 

Welcome!

We get out to NW RI every so often. It's pretty cold now, so might be a while. But I'll make sure to get you in the loop next time there's a group heading out that way.

 

Welcome aboard


We make wheeling and hanging out plans over here.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/new-england-mod-day-meetup-thread-we’re-goin-axe-throwin…-right.762539/

 

Thanks!

 

IIRC Sirius purchased Pandora several years ago.

 

To chime in unprompted - My wife and I have been using Spotify for almost 10 years now, paying I think 15/month for the two-person membership (used to be less, but then again, so was everything).

Has a lot of podcasts now, too. I've been quite happy with it so far.

BUT, it is on the stock market as $SPOT, meaning that eventually, they're going to run out of organic growth runway and fall back on cutting costs and features, while increasing membership costs, inserting ads, etc, to continue the path of profit that is "needed" for existing as a publicly held company (See: Netflix, Snapchat, etc)

 

Yeah I've been running Spotify since it was in beta, I pay for premium @ 11 or 12 bucks now (again, used to be less...) but I get Hulu with adds for free on my account so I still see it as worth it

 

I have SXM in the work van, and the Tacoma.
Also have Spotify, and Amazon music.
I use Spotify exclusively on the bike, but, everywhere else, it gets added to the rotation.
My wife has all her POD costs, and I can build albums as much as I want.

It's the video streaming that I need to sort out, and update.

 

There's a couple of reasons I keep the Sirius sub. One, my wife's commute sends her through a dead zone for cell service and she likes to listen to Stern and her Grateful Dead channel. Two, I like to listen to Lithium and I actually enjoy the DJ's commentary. I guess it reminds me of the days of 92.3 K-Rock in NYC playing all that music when it was new so it's a nostalgia thing. To a lesser extent I keep it in my Taco because it's usually our road trip vehicle and we always road trip somewhere with spotty cell service. In my commuter I just listen to it on the app through Android Auto. However, I call them annually and work them over for a better deal.

 

Amazon video has ads now.
I have it right now because I had a promo happening for amazon prime for a couple months, but it's up now, and I'm not reupping.

I'll find ways to watch these things without prime subscription.

That's the biggest reason I sign up for spotify, I keep stuff offline for when I'm 400 miles from service, or the few dead zones I go through too.

I guess, now that I think of it, I have youtube music too because we're signed up for Youtube plus or premium or whatever it's called.

I don't mind DJs/hosts, in fact, I enjoy the interjections and bits sometimes. But ads....Ads are the hard stop for me. I have a 7 minute commute, if I was on the radio for that, there's a strong chance it would just be 100% ads. I sit at my desk and listen to music during the work shift - I don't have the patience for ads.

 

Most stations on SXM don't have commercials but some of the news ones do, the ones that are rebroadcastings of TV news channels and sporting events do but I don't think any of the music ones do. My commute is 60-90 minutes and her's is about the same. I've been using Spotify for podcasts since Google dropped that service and tried to send me to YT Music for it.

 

Hey, if it works for you, it works. No issue with using the right service!

> I've been using Spotify for podcasts since Google dropped that service and tried to send me to YT Music for it.

To me, this is wild. I have an iphone because my work hand-me-downs, once it dies I'm going back to android so long as I'm the one footing the bill. But, I only ever used some native podcasts app, but then when I tried YT music for podcasts, it was a disaster. That was only about a year ago or so. Maybe it was just the ones we listen to that didn't jive with YT Music.

I'll give it another go. If I can get YT Music to jive, I'd be down to cancel spotify, overlapping services and all that. I think I remember the quality was bunk though, and I'm not even someone who really cares about that.

 

I use youtube music. Same deal I didnt know why I was paying for spotofy and youtube music.

Eh its good enough

 

I just looked, out of curiosity, because I apparently had it on my work phone.

• Podcasts - better, but still rough compared to Spotify. I might be convinced to give it a whack or try Spotify on non-premium for podcasts or figure out something else. We listen to 3, and I only found 1 on there up to date, one was there but not up to date, and one was just not even on there.
  
• YT Music doesn't allow downloads to an apple watch. So, while I'm in the apple ecosystem (unfortunately) I would have to have my phone with my to use my watch to stream music....Which, defeats the purpose of the watch for runs.

So, I think I'm stuck paying more for a bit, but it's a consideration when the phone or watch kicks it and I move back to android anyway.

 

@GarlicFarts I found YT music to be terrible for podcasts as well. Spotify is better but I still found Google podcasts to be by far the easiest to use and create playlists.

 

I'ma take a page out of @CTSpruceMica 's advice book - "I paid more for a cocktail".

Spotify for two is currently 18/month.
I, alone, listened to 52672 minutes - according to spotify. That's 877 hours for the year, about 73 hours per month of use, if it's level loaded.

I paid about 20$ to watch all of the olympics, on our own schedule, we got, if I had to estimate, 50 hours of use out of that 20$. Worth it.

18/month, for 73 hours of use, just for me - not including my wife on the plan as well - doesn't seem like a bad deal.

It works for the music and podcasts, playlists, watch, everything.

after actually running those numbers, I'm not that fussed about using it.

 

We have the duo plan too. I used to have a grandfathered Spotify/Hulu deal for myself so we hadn't gone that route, but recently re-evaluated all of our streaming services and swapped it over. Ended up with the following streaming services:

Spotify Duo - $16.99/mo
Disney+/Hulu/HBO Bundle - $29.99/mo - $7/mo AmEx Credit = $22.99/mo
Netflix - $15.49/mo
Amazon Prime - $139/year

Netflix is the one I consider eliminating sometimes - we definitely use it less than all of the others. I also weigh Amazon sometimes because we barely use the streaming. I'm tempted to let it go then see if the shipping costs are actually an issue. I do have a 5% back card and I think that would drop to 3% without Prime, but 2% of what I buy there is definitely nowhere near the annual fee.

 

I killed Prime, and the shipping costs are still free, just not overnight, and needs to be 35$+, which is good because it trimmed off some of my "I should just buy this and get it tomorrow" purchases. But you can still get free shipping, 3-4 days, and still get them delivered to the lockers up the road.

If you spend about 7k at Amazon every year, then the card pays for the prime membership. (139/.02, since it's a 2% difference, 3% instead of 5%). That 7k includes spend at Whole Foods.