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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

They have an incredibly efficient negative cancelation program that hikes the teaser rate to something like $45/mo.

Cancellation is also by phone call only, which creates a lot of friction. I’ve tried to cancel a couple of times, and let it lapse once, and they always end up dropping my rate to $4/mo. Hard to say no to $50/year for 150 more options in your car. Even when the bitrate is like listening to a 1998 mp3.

It is indeed surprising to me that people can tolerate the low bitrate sound. I would consider subscribing but I can’t stand to actually listen. Do subscribers get a higher bitrate? My impression is that it’s a limitation of the satellite signal bandwidth and the number of channels they cram into it.

I have worked in the music streaming industry.

We did not try to cheat with bitrate but I am confident that only 1/100000 users would actually notice any difference between 128kbit/s and anything higher.

Even going lower than 128, you would be surprised how low you need to go before it really becomes noticeable to end users.

And that's why I never even activated XM on my new car even though it came with a 1 year free trial.

I have Pandora Plus $5/month.

Also owned by Sirius btw

I didn't know that. At least it's extremely easy to cancel my Pandora subscription and they don't hound you like XM does. XM sends me a letter a month even though I never signed up. I'm curious how long they'll keep it up.

They used to send me a ton of letters, even phone calls. You can opt out of that, as I did, and they will stop it.

Yeah, I'm looking at getting one of the cheap teaser receivers at BBY and then activating it on a Privacy.com card or a giftcard or something, so they can't pull that even if I forget or am unable to navigate their cancellation hoops.

I recently tried to subscribe to XM radio using multiple pre-paid Visa cards (for the same reason you outlined above) and all were denied. It also seems that using a credit card that expires before your subscription lapses won't help you either. They will send a bill to your address on file and report you to a collection agency if you do not pay.

Giving expiring card information does not magically make you not liable for a charge. It just makes it harder for them to collect and (hopefully) harder for you to forget about the charge.

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