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kevinherron

Wow. I know like every new car comes with a trial but I didn’t realize people actually activated it.

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Even more impressive than the market cap previously referenced is their actual business is vastly superior to Spotify.

Sirius 2019: $7.8b in sales, $1.7b operating income

Spotify 2019: $6.7b in sales, -$73m operating income

Spotify's market cap is supported by a fantasy that one day, somehow, if they get big enough they might generate a real profit to support their Wile E. Coyote valuation (don't look down). So for example, if they get to $20 billion in sales (in another 10 years), maybe they'll spit off as much profit as Sirius does right now in exchange for a similar market cap.

Man, I did not know these facts. I would have never guessed.

Spotify has solid user growth, and just invested heavily in the podcast ecosystem. Also they just reintroduced 3-month trials for their subscriptions which slows conversion and therefore revenue growth. Of all the tech companies out there, I think Spotify ranks among the more solid ones.

Compared to Spotify, SiriusXM has lower content costs (favorable statuatory licensing rates and a larger fraction of exclusive owned content) and a better user demographic (wealthy middle age Americans). Their churn rate is negligible.

I have probably 6 or 7 paid subscriptions for my personal use. Aside from Netflix, SxM is probably the one I would cancel last of the group.

What are your use cases? 6 or 7 seems like a lot.

Not the person you're asking, but it seems it's very easy to get to 6 or 7: Netflix, Prime, Hulu, HBO2Go, AppleTV+, Disney+, Spotify, SxM, etc

I think like the person you replied to I misread is as having 6 or 7 SxM subscriptions, which sounded like a big flex "I have 6, maybe 7, cars".

6 or 7 paid subs sounds reasonable.

> Aside from Netflix, SxM is probably the one I would cancel last of the group.

I read it that way as well right up until I read the rest of the comment where the last sentence made it clear.

My mistake. 6 or 7 DIFFERENT apps. I have one Sirius sub that we use in the one car we own.

Yeah, I originally misunderstood and thought it was that many SxM subs. Was a little confused. Makes more sense now.

I had 6 for a while. Three cars, two home stereos, and a handheld. Most of those eventually became obsolete as the app and Sonos integration became usable, so now it's just in the cars.

DAZN WWE TuneIn JeFiT Spotify Netflix Sirius Dropbox

Does not include subs I use for my business like GSuite, Freshbooks, Front, Zapier, Monday, etc.

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

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.

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.

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.

I use and love it in all of my cars. I have Spotify and Apple Music too, but there's something about actual "radio" without commercials that I enjoy for longer drives.

Sirius is the only decent music discovery service for me since there's some actual human curation going on (at least on their main channel lineup). Spotify is nice when I have playlists prepared and ready to go but that takes work and I get tired of most of my playlist content after a week. Discover Weekly is garbage, and Google Music's version was far worse. Never tried Apple music.

But I've also noticed the repetition on SXM but I've settled on 3-4 channels I like so I switch between them to combat staleness.

When I've had to cancel the service, their sales department is pretty aggressive in talking you out of it.

For others, it's a highly compelling service. I know people who subscribe just to listen to Howard Stern.

A number of stores use Sirius for their background music too.

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