Recurring Monthly Costs: Which Are Worth It? Which Are Not?
Wednesday, 17th October 2007 (by J.D. Roth) I met some friends at a local restaurant Monday night. While chatting, we found ourselves bopping to the music playing on the radio. For more than hour, great song followed great song: U2, Eurythmics, The Police, Elvis Costello, The Clash, New Order. But the ambient noise made it impossible to know what station we were hearing. “I have to know what this is,” I said at last. “This could be my new favorite radio station.”
I tracked down the manager. He told me we were listening to Fred on 44, a channel on XM Satellite Radio. I’d heard of satellite radio, but didn’t know much about it. When I got home, I did some research.
As expected, there’s an upfront cost to obtain a receiver that can de-scramble the satellite signal. Unfortunately, that’s not the only cost. There’s also a subscription fee of around $10/month.
Alas — a subscription fee. They’re not deal-breakers for me, but they turn otherwise sure things into financial dilemmas. I don’t mind one-time costs, but subscriptions make me wary.
I would love to purchase an iPhone, for example. The initial hardware cost is fine. I can justify that. But I can’t justify a $60/month, two-year contract. That’s nearly $1500 for a device I don’t actually need. I stopped playing World of Warcraft because of the subscription fee. I loved the game, but in order to get my money’s worth, I felt like I needed to play more than is healthy.
I view recurring expenses as potential money sinks. Too often I don’t get value for what I spend. For three years I carried an $70/month deluxe digital cable package so that I could watch high-definition television. But at most, I was watching an hour or two of television per month! Besides, who needs to see Antiques Roadshow in high-def?
Over the past year, I’ve cut the number of magazines to which I subscribe, dropped to basic cable, and cancelled my Audible account. These moves have freed over $100/month. Eliminating recurring expenses has made a significant difference to my cash flow. Most of the time, I don’t even miss the things I’ve eliminated!
Of course, we each probably have a few recurring expenses that are easy to justify due to the pleasure or utility they bring us. I’m willing to shell out for The New Yorker because even though I only read about one issue per month, when I do read it, I love it. And if I find the time to listen to audiobooks again, I’ll re-subscribe to Audible — it’s a good deal when I actually use it.
I can’t decide whether paying for satellite radio would be smart or not. I’ve signed up for the free three-day trial of XM’s web service. So far, I like it. I’d probably subscribe:
- If NPR were available,
- If there were some sort of device that allowed me to receive XM on my iPod, or
- If it cost less.
As it stands, am I willing to spend $10/month for XM, and then pay for a receiver? How about $8/month for the streaming web version? I don’t know. For now, I’m just going to dig through my iTunes library to create some new playlists. I can probably duplicate the sound of Fred on 44. Maybe that will be enough…
I subscribe to Sirius, but after paying for a year’s subscription, I find I’m not actually listening to it that much. I can get the CBC on the Net or on my radio, many of the other shows I like are available somewhere on the web, and I find that I can get a truly eclectic playlist of indie rock, classics, and obscure goodies via The Hype Machine’s new streaming radio feature. (OK, so they’re playing Kylie Minogue right now. I did say they were eclectic.)
I agree that subscriptions are a money sink. I love The Atlantic, but even though my $32 subscription to it gives me both the print magazine and web access, I’m not reading it as often as I used to. My leisure time and toys, like my RSS feed video iPod, are stuffed with new music and my political, scientific and pop culture blogs and podcasts. I don’t keep up with all of those either, but at least they’re free.
I think we’re all spoiled for choice these days, whether we pay for content or not. I remember when my first Walkman was a big deal, as I could carry a small collection of cassettes with me and listen to my faves anywhere, any time. I remember running through a bitterly cold winter in 1991-1992 listening to Billy Bragg, Costello, The Housemartins, The Church and Pixies almost exclusively. I now have thousands of songs on iTunes that I probably cherish less than the handful I used to have on vinyl and cassette.
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Like you I hate the monthly costs. However, most people I know that have XM love it. So, as a suggestion why don’t you cut $10/month from somewhere else or maybe sell something that you have, but don’t use, to offset the $120/year.
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I have always thought that the best business ideas had a subscription type setup for less than $25 a month. That seems to be the magic number in which, if you can provide a service valuable enough for people to initially want, you can easily charge them month to month forever. For under $25 people don’t seem to think its a significant enough of an amount to really look into canceling. (Thanks NetFlix) lol.
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You should really check out Pandora.com – Free streaming internet music – and you get to choose your music.
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I listen almost exclusively to NPR…. I don’t think I would pay for XM at this point. I’m happy with my ipod for music and the radio for interesting stories.
I do think they have little XM-to-go type receivers which you can carry around as though it were an ipod…. but that would be another cost.
Maybe they offer a trial period, so you could determine if it was worth it to you. Some people do love it.
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What about Pandora.com? It is internet radio and you can make any station you want. If you just plug in the songs that ‘fred on 44′ played it will take it from there. A little monitoring and you’ll be hearing everything you love and probably some songs you didn’t know your liked. The best part is that it’s free.
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“For three years I carried an $70/month deluxe digital cable package so that I could watch high-definition television.”
FYI: there is a much cheaper way to get HD television – at least where I live. I found out that you can order the ultra basic cable (not digital) for around $12/month. Then you can add to that the HD package for $5/month. This HD package includes all the local networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX) plus ESPN, ESPN2 and a few bonus HD-only channels like Discovery HD Theater. We don’t watch much TV, so this was the perfect way to get HD programming at a low cost.
Cheers!
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Just FYI – Fred is available on Directv’s xm satellite radio offerings with most of their packages. It’s channel 834, I believe. If you’re paying for cable, might want to check this out as an alternative. There are usually deals so that you get free receivers and installation, sometimes a few months free service. Then you could at least listen at home, we do this quite a bit if we want to hear something new or that we don’t have on iPod. The price is competitive with cable in our area (South Florida – and yes, reception is good – even in our unpredictable weather). I promise I don’t work for them, but the referral bonus is generous (I’m trying to justify this as a frugality measure), so please remember where you got this info.
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Yes, I am very wary of recurring monthly charges too. It feels like buying a printer, it is very cheap, but you end up spending a ton on toners! My ex boss used to say subscriptions are the best business model you can have. Once you have a loyal customer base, they will just keep buying and buying without a second thought and you don’t even need to do much marketing to acquire new customers. As long as the content is good, business will thrive year after year.
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JD- you might want to have a look at Pandora: http://www.pandora.com/
Free over the web – you select music and it creates stations for you with music of similar style. Also available with receivers in home starting at $300. I’m under the impression that is the only cost to take it off the computer (also it works with Sprint cell phones).
No NPR, but great for music.
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I couldn’t function without my XM! I have it in the car and the portable radio that I can bring it in the house. When at work I use the online stream which is free with a regular subscription. I listen to allot of baseball games during the summer and I enjoy allot of the talk programs not available on regular radio in my area. Now I can’t wait for the SIRIUS merger to complete so I can get the NFL games too. I generally pay a year in advance and it doesn’t seem to be such a money sink that way. At least, that’s how I rationalize it.
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Hm. I forgot about Netflix. That’s an example of a recurring fee I don’t mind paying. (Well, actually that comes out of Kris’ money…) We watch 10-12 DVDs/month with Netflix, and it has really reduced how much I spend on buying new DVDs. This seems like a good deal to me…
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I, too, am very wary of services/products with recurring monthly charges. I justify cable/internet because I watch a decent amount of tv and it acts as a balance to more expensive things I would otherwise be doing. I’ve begun a large purging and trimming of my monthly expenses in an attempt to get completely debt free and I absolutely hate monthly recurrences I cannot get rid of.
I would love an iPhone and would not have a problem paying the out of pocket expense but could not justify the $70+/month for service [even if I were not provided a perfectly good phone through work]. JD, perhaps the touch iPod is a good compromise for you?
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I’m in my second year with XM, and we pay the fee annually, which is at reduced cost over the monthly bill. NPR programming is available on XM, but once you listen to CBC, BBC, and other news offerings, you start to realize how — I don’t know what I want to say — crappy NPR has become.
You and I are the same age, and I am OBSESSED with FRED. But then there’s Chill (84), which we listen to with dinner every night, Classic Soul (60 I think), which is so great for me because I only know about half the songs and usually love the other half when I hear them.
The nice thing about XM for music is that you can listen to a type of music rather than a cd. In fact, we rarely open our cd cabinet anymore.
Also, I bought the car adapter, which is cheap, and it will change your life for drives more than 1/2 hour long, especially across the country, when you might only get country and/or scary preachers for hundreds of miles.
Go for it!
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I too dislike monthly costs, but I do my best to put them in relation to other things that I buy. For instance, I used to play World of Warcraft also, along with Final Fantasy XI before that. I justified the payments this way: They provided entertainment, so I compared their costs to other sources of entertainment that I would be using instead. For instance, going to the movies was about $7 (student discount). That means two movies a month was equivalent to the cost of the games, and playing the games meant I wasn’t going to the movies.
Of course, now I do neither and save that money instead
So I guess it’s all relative. But I guess the point is, you may be offsetting another cost with the new one, so be sure to take that into consideration.
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Here’s another vote for Pandora! I love creating multiple different stations according to my mood and enjoying them for free.
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I second the Netflix move (though we use Blockbuster Online). We used to average around $60-$70/month between going out to movies, renting movies, and buying DVDs. Now we’ve replaced that with a $17/month fixed charge where we get whatever movies we want. I’m not a huge fan of monthly recurring charges but this was a case where I could replace a variable cost that was a little out of control with a fixed cost I could control (by changing plans if needed).
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Yo can get HD television for free. Most broadcast TV stations are broadcasting in digital these days. Indeed, come February, 2009, the FCC says that all analog broadcast TV signals will stop.
Many of these digital broadcasts are also HD signals.
To find out what’s available in your area, check out:
http://www.tvfool.com/
You can get good deals on antennas at:
http://www.solidsignal.com/antennas/
Need help deciding on an antenna? See:
http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/comparing.html
Yes, a good antenna set-up may cost you a pretty penny. But it’s a one time cost. After that, all the TV is free.
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We just started our subscriptions to Netflix and Gamefly after reviewing how much we were spending at the video store each month on movies and games. It was essentially a wash one way or the other, but the added flexibility of the online queues makes it a much better deal.
I can’t imagine paying for XM either. I’ve got 50-60 Gb of music I can use on my Zune (which has the FM tuner built in so I still have my NPR). My brother on the other hand, loves his XM, but he hooks it up to his home theatre, in the car and at his desk all day at work, so it’s worth it to him.
It’s all about perspective and what value you get out of the service you are paying for monthly.
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I strongly dislike monthly payments and subscriptions, and try to avoid them if possible. But that is for my situation.
If digital radio is something you will use often, then $10-12 a month is not a lot of money. It is an even better deal when you consider you can use the receiver at home, in your car, and on the go (if you have the right hardware).
But, is satellite radio better than your current iPod? Basically, you music choice boils down to:
- Do you want to carry 2 music gadgets?
- If not, do you prefer to make your own playlist from your music (iPod), or have access to changing playlists, but risk not wanting to hear what your want, when you want (satellite radio)?
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JD, you might also want to look into HD Radio. It depends upon what radio market you are in, but in my market there are several HD Radio stations that play music feeds that I enjoy greatly and they only insert station IDs rather than commercials.
HD radio requires you purchase the receiver, but after that the content is free, as it comes through on digital broadcast over the FM band.
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I think you bring up a good point when you consider usage and pleasure as part of your decision whether to subscribe or keep a subscription.
For us, cable is not worth the monthly fees, but Netflix is. I know people love their satellite radio, but it isn’t something I’m like to ever subscribe to. There are so many other ways to listen to music for free…regular radio, Pandora, Launchcast, converting CDs we already own to MP3, doing the same with CDs borrowed from the library, etc.
In most cases, if I can get it for free, I won’t subscribe to it. And if I do subscribe, you can bet it’s to something I use day in and day out.
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I’ve been a long-time Netflix subscriber, and found it to be worthwhile if we’ve got the time to watch the movies. The hardest part about getting your money’s worth out of Netflix is watching your queue and making sure that you want to watch the next movies that they’re going to send you. There have been times where I’ve played “Hmm, I’d watch that” with their recommendations because I was bored, only to have the movie come in the mail and then sit on my desk for the month because I was never interested enough in watching it to pop it in the DVD player.
Another thing to watch out for is Gym memberships. I joined the gym thinking “If I have to pay for this, surely I’ll make it a point of going”, I’m losing money there, and need to get rid of that one stat!
I played WoW while I was in college, but ended up canceling the subscription because I didn’t have enough time to play it to make it worth the $20 a month. I re-subscribed after graduation when I had spare time on my hands, but found it to be a lot of the same, there was a point where it just got boring. I’ve learned that it’s not worth it to me to buy a game that I’m going to have to pay to continue to play(I look at it as buying the right to rent the right to play the game, if that’s not confusing). Games like Battlefield [Vietnam | 2 | 2042] are better for me because I can play online for free.
As far as music goes, if you yard sale, listen to the music, and then eBay the cds, you end up finding music for basically free by the time you’ve paid for the cd, and then paid to sell it, the buyer’s paid all of your costs. It’s a great way to find out if you like new music, or collect music you might not have heard.
The worst part about subscriptions is that it’s so easy to forget that they’re there, and just take for granted the service, even if you’re not using it much. How’s that for a one hour money-saving project? Re-evaluate all of your subscriptions to be sure that you’re getting your value out of them (canceling any that you’re not).
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One of the dangers of subscriptions is that the individual monthly bill is affordable, which can lull you into subscribing to lots of services over time. They quickly add up to something Really Significant. It’s the biggest problem I see with the subscription-based model for online services (like 37signals Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, etc., and Microsoft’s “Live” software). Individually you think, sure this is affordable, but once you start subscribing to several services you end up paying over $100/month for it all. I am very subscription-resistant these days after having this happen to me more than once.
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I have to agree on this one. Recurring payments bug me when it’s something I’d like to use, but won’t use often enough to justify the cost. However, I have quite a few recurring payments that are worth it – Internet, Family Fun magazine (which we do read and use), sometimes a Newspaper subscription when it saves money on the cover price (for the coupons, mostly).
For me, XM wouldn’t be a value – I don’t listen to enough radio/music to justify the monthly expense. I know others who are constantly listening, though, and for them it would be money well spent. I’d be better served with a receiver that could do MP3s, either via CD or flash memory of some sort. That helps me in long stretches of road where all I can get are NPR and Country or some really awful Pop/Top 20 station. With the MP3s, I can choose what I want and listen whether i have reception or not.
Sounds like you may benefit from an XM subscription, but I would also wonder if you’d build up a collection of music you want that could be streamed or carried with you. With the proper classifications on the files, you could easily play a type of music, an artist/group, or just random selections. While not cheaper in the short term, it could be in the long term. Of course, the downside is you won’t be exposed to new groups that way. It’s all about trade-offs.
As for the online gaming – that’s one thing I’ve never been able to justify, even if the game looks really cool, and some have looked like a lot of fun. I just don’t have the free time to spend several hours per month that I feel would justify taking part in those games. If I did, I’d have to pick one game to which I’d devote my time or try to balance a bunch of them.
Now the big question – how do you determine whether that recurring cost is worthwhile or not? When do you re-evaluate that cost? Often, it just becomes part of the background, especially those
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monthly subscriptions are the bane of my existence. I’m currently at a stalemate with Comcast over my high speed internet connection. They recently bought out Time Warner or did some sort of trade and now there is no competition in our area. They want you to do a bundle package and if you don’t they keep increasing your rates. It has crept up nearly every month. If I put it on a per hour usage, sort of you did for your cable, then it seems reasonable, but still I hate it.
I negotiated my satellite bill so that even with fees and taxes it is $24 per month, which gets us most of the channels we watch. Although my husband keeps complaining about the lack of ESPN. So that may go up soon.
Good points about XM. I listen to the satellite stations that come with my tv package, which is nice.
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Oh, J.D., this post made me laugh. You’re just 3 years older than I am, and what’s happened is we’ve finally become our parents, and we now like “oldies” on the radio like The Clash and New Order, hehe. But I just use YouTube to get my fix of all this stuff. In fact, I spent a good chunk of my day yesterday listening to this “oldie” over and over while I did paperwork here in my office (remember this one?) –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fNu-_TP9Z8
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I too am not a fan of the recurring fee. I dropped the monthly $65 for basic cable and internet to only $13 for our citywide wireless internet here in Tempe, AZ. My one time cost for TV service has been the purchase of a new 32″ HDTV for $400 and I get great reception from all the stations that broach over the air (OTA) HD signals using a regular TV antenna. For radio, I am still waiting on some of the home players to come down in price or maybe an equivalent to the portable XM and Sirius receivers for HD Radio. It will be great to get free crystal clear radio with a lot of multi-cast channels to choose from. You mentioned audible.com. Well the libraries are adding these digital content download net libraries to their repertoire now. Using your library card number and password online, you can get ahold of ebooks, audio books and yes even TV shows, such as Antiques Road Show!
Checkout your library to see if they carry relationships with MylibraryDV (http://www.mylibrarydv.com/), Net Library (http://www.netlibrary.com/) and Overdrive (http://overdrive.com/). Great stuff!
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My 2 cents:
I think you can pay for a year of XM or Sirius in advance for less than the monthly subscription rate. I just saw something on Fatwallet.com that said for $77 you can get a year of XM. I don’t know if that promotion is still good. You can also stream commercial-free internet radio to your stereo with a cheap rca cable. You probably know this already.
If you want to save on magazines, consider buying subscriptions on ebay. I got Time for $17 a year, a 2-year subscription to Runner’s World for $18 and a 4-year subscription to Fitness for $8. Warning: only buy from sellers with thousands (not hundreds) of positive reviews. fyi – it can take 12 weeks for the subscription to kick in, but you can check the magazine customer service website to make sure your sub has been ordered after a month or so.
Love your article. Thanks.
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We spend, each month, about $92 total for cable, HBO, and DVR packages. However (and I just counted) right now we’re watching roughly 25 hours of programming a week, which is the bulk of our entertainment, which takes our cost of per-hour programming down to under a dollar. This also doesn’t include when we happen to find something we’re interested in watching.
During the television “off season” I believe we had managed to find about 10-15 hours of programming that we enjoyed. Instead of “wasting” money at Blockbuster to fill in our time, each week we would hit HBO and load up our DVR with movies to get us through the “dead” days. We were taping and watching an average of 6-8 moves a week, which made the whole package very worth it to us, especially since HBO airs without commercials.
So, in my case, since we watch so much television (and quite a bit of it on cable channels as well)- and several overlapping timeslots, which is why we LOVE our DVR- I find our cable bill to be worth it, especially since it cuts down our movie theater/Blockbuster visits to about once every two months.
—slightly off topic—
For those of you who DO love movie theaters- Keresotes Theaters does have the Five Buck Club, which is great. You usually do have to wait two or three weeks to get the movies for the cheaper price. However, I’m a little hard of hearing, and I would prefer to see a movie in a slightly empty theater, so we usually do try to go mid-week or at other odd times.
For Blockbuster junkies, I L-O-V-E the Rewards program. (As a caveat, I used to work for Blockbuster, but haven’t for several years.) The typical Rewards program is $10 for one year, if they haven’t raised the price, but it allows you to rent one free “core” movie (from the center of the store) with any rental Monday through Wednesday. Additionally, five rentals will get you one free (which can be any) and you’re given one free core movie a month.
If you watch older movies (the core is usually one year old and older) then this pays for itself with the free monthly rental. If you’re good a planning ahead, it’s a great way to get more bang for your rental buck, or it’s a nice way to justify getting that movie that you were curious about but didn’t want to spend money on.
—back on topic now- sorry—
Personally, I would be terrible at Netflix. I’m already awful at remembering to mail things out, and I would feel like I had to watch a “certain number of movies” to get my money’s worth. For now, I’m going to stick with HBO, but Netflix does intrigue me. That’s really a subscription service I’m still evaluating for my personal needs.
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I pay for cable and still have to watch commercials. Satellite radio, you’re paying to listen to maybe 5 stations at most, and at least a couple of them have commercials. I thought part of the greatness of satellite radio was no commercials. Since I already own most of the music i love, and i still go and buy quite a bit of it, why bother with paying for radio>?
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I also stopped my simplyaudiobooks.com subscription and now I get get audiobooks on CD at the library. I can go online and request which books from other libraries in the area I’d like to have sent to my local library and they call me when they’re in. They’ve also started an MP3 system that I haven’t tried out yet. You can check out a small MP3 player that has only the one book loaded into it. Or you can download the book at home and I think it disappears after your time is up. You can also load the downloaded book onto your own MP3 player.
I’m getting through a lot of the classics this way. I go to Audiofilemagazine.com to find good narrators. (Some articles require a subscription but I’ve gotten a lot of info from that site even without the extra features a subscription provides.)
I find the library system is much easier than I expected.
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NPR – download your favorite shows for free through their website, or Itunes
Audio books – check your library. My public library just started offering audiobook downloads good for a month.
Netflix – create your own queque from your local library’s website. I haven’t paid to rent a movie in years.
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Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that my wife and I get almost all our movies from the library. Our libraries carry everything, and I mean everything, even r-rated horror movies like Hostel and Saw and whatever … I just borrowed INLAND EMPIRE a couple of nights ago. So people might want to check w/ their local libraries … of course it helps that my wife is a librarian and can snag the good stuff as it comes in, but this is a great free way to keep up w/ movies.
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I don’t think I could justify spending $10 a month to listen to radio. The way I look at it, how many hours a day do you really LISTEN to the radio, I mean sit there and enjoy every song. Most of the time, when the radio (or TV sometimes in my case) is on, it’s just background noise. Yeah, I try to find a station I like, and yeah, if I catch a really great song it puts me in a good mood, but I don’t sit there and pay attention to song after song. So I would take the time you listen to the radio and decrease it by the time you actually LISTEN to the radio. I would bet that time is much less and the cost benifit ratio is much higher.
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Dave, I’ve never heard that Misfits song before. It’s funny, though. Yesterday I went to YouTube, too, looking for some songs I hadn’t heard in a while. It was great to hear “Bring on the Dancing Horses Again”, but good grief that video is awful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaWs79v0ugE
And oh my goodness. Here is my single favorite song if all time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHnXOSxka1Q
U2′s “Bad”, the Live Aid version. I could listen to that all day…
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NPR is available on XM, I think it’s channel 130, but I could be wrong on the exact station. They also have a bunch of other great talk stations (I prefer Air America on 167 myself.)
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I’m a Sirius subscriber and love the service. I don’t have a car anymore so I’m selling my receiver but I’m keeping the internet radio account (at least through the end of the subscription). I listen at work over the internet.
J.D. I suggest looking on ebay for an sirius internet radio account. I didn’t see any when I looked a few months ago except for the one I sold. Since sirius gives you a free internet account with each physical radio. I had two physical radios but only needed one internet account. It sold on ebay a few months ago for $26. A great deal if you ask me.
Alternatively maybe one of your readers who has a free internet account but doesn’t use it (or doesn’t know and hasn’t even set it up) can let you listen for free.
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I view recurring expenses as potential money sinks. Too often I don’t get value for what I spend. For three years I carried an $70/month deluxe digital cable package so that I could watch high-definition television. But at most, I was watching an hour or two of television per month! Besides, who needs to see Antiques Roadshow in high-def?
Amy Dacyczyn of the Tightwad Gazette said that cable tv was like a barometer. People who were paying a monthly bill for cable and were deep in debt simply didn’t get it. She felt that those people should not only cancel cable, but also sell the tv and use the time more productively, such as money saving hobbies or earning money to pay off the debt.
We do not have cable tv here, but we do have a regular antenna to watch non cable tv and Antiques Roadshow is one we watch. I personally do not want cable tv because I don’t want another monthly bill to pay, its simply not worth it to me.
Belinda
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Here’s the deal:
This goes for folks that don’t have an HD television and are not looking to waste money on those things to increase the amount of payments they fork out for their entertainment budget every month. Go to TVLinks.com. There you get a very large number of shows, documentaries and movies that can be streamlined to your computer for your enjoyment for free. That is how I got rid of an expensive $90 digital cable package. Also, for some of the heavier phone users, think about using VOIP systems like Skype. You can very cheaply, get AN ENTIRE YEAR’S WORTH OF CALLING IN ANYWHERE IN US AND CANADA FOR ABOUT $24.00 FOR HOWEVER LONG YOU WANT AND ANYTIME. This definately helps out if you do a lot of calling before your nightime minutes kick in for your cellular provider if you have one. I also agree with some of the peoples’ decisions to get rid of their monthly subscriptions to magazines that they don’t read too often. As for the music thing, I usually will just go onto music streaming channels and listen to the free music they got up there. It works out real well for music that has been out there for a while. New music, you would still have to either buy from iTunes, eBay, or you could always borrow from a friend. Hope this helps.
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I don’t subscribe to radio, but if I did it would not be XM, it would be Sirius – where NPR is available for you, and Stern and a host of other things.
A friend of mine uses Verizon cell service and has Sirius. He has a Motorola Q (not the newest one that just came out) and can actually stream Sirius to his phone, via the web browser. He uses that feature daily when on break at work, and gets every cent out of his monthly fee for Sirus and the data plan for his phone.
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I hate recurring costs. Somehow, I need to find a way to heal my internet bills. TV is terrible, so I cancelled that. Next to go is water, power, and heat…those will be tough.
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We have Sirius and we love it. They have a product called the Stiletto that is a portable receiver plus an mp3 player. By using that, you can listen to it at home, in the car, and on the go without having to buy separate receivers or separate subscriptions.
The biggest downside we’ve noticed is that if you’re in the car and you go through a tunnel or under a bridge, you lose signal. It’s not a problem here (no tunnels) but I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who had to go through long tunnels on a daily basis.
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I have a habit of going through our budget and cutting recurring monthly expenses …all the time. It hurts to spend money on, say, a gym membership when you’re not using it this month. Unfortunately, we’re in a 2-year contract with them, and it’s $350 to cancel early (yipe!), so we’ll be keeping that particular expense until it expires…and using it as much as we can stand.
There are two recurring non-essentials that have value for us:
-Netflix. Hoo boy. We just finished the entire series of Star Trek: Voyager. I’m all about getting free videos at the library, but they don’t have that kind of selection! We may cut Netflix for a bit while we’re only getting movies, but once we get back into a TV series, it’s Netflix all the way. Did I mention we don’t have cable?
-MMORPG. Pick one! Seriously, my husband and I really enjoy playing online games together. We only have one subscription at a time, and when we get bored with a particular game, we cancel it until we’re in the mood to play it again. Yay for month-to-month billing. Gaming gives us something fun to do together, which keeps us from getting bored at home, which keeps us from going out and blowing the budget on entertainment. It’s just how our minds work.
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We have XM Satellite radio here and I have to admit it is really cool. I believe to subscription for us was free for a year, but I can’t remember how that came to be. Anyways, I prefer, too, if there were just a one-time fee as opposed to a subscription, but I don’t think they’ll be changing their pricing model anytime soon. It sure has been working.
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I think an iPod playlist that mimics the station is your best course of action here. I like to do all my music listening on my iPod to make sure I’m really getting use out of the music I have purchased for it and getting use out of the iPod itself. If I were you I’d start by making a “smart playlist” that includes all of the artists you listed and add additional artists as you think of them. You already paid for the music either as CDs or digital files so you should use what you have rather than paying for it again via satillite radio. I recently wrote a post in my blog about playlists for the iPod http://haveless.blogspot.com/2007/09/managing-large-music-library-on-small.html
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For people who spend a good chunk of each work day in their cars, like SF Bay Area commuters, XM radio might be a good choice. I have a coworker who listens to his portable XM reciever (or maybe he’s on Sirius?) at work; he seems pretty happy with it. But there are plenty of internet radio stations around, so the at-work usage seems less valuable.
I also like how the satellite radios play channels you won’t find anywhere else. I happen to like both trance and bluegrass music, but those aren’t station types you’ll find in most of the US.
I break up monthly-recurring costs in to three categories. (1) Required, things like electricity, rent, and cell/internet which I need for my telecommuting job. (2) Acceptable if used regularly, things like XM radio and Netflix. (3) Crappy deals to avoid, things like cable TV and most cell phone add-on services.
Category (2) stuff needs regular review to see if you’re getting your money’s worth. If not drop it sooner, not later.
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Omg, Bring on the Dancing Horses — I haven’t thought of that song in years. But you know, J.D., there’s no objective reality anymore w/ these sorts of songs … the songs we were all exposed to as kids and teenagers, for better or worse, become “our generation’s” songs, and those songs will sound good to us *no matter what.* This means, God help me, I’m stuck loving shit like this –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRTVi7rH_zs
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There is a way to may XM Radio work with your iPod, but it’s a bit nerdy:
There’s an XM radio device called the XMPCR which connects to your computer via USB and a line-in audio cable. Now, the XMPCR is no longer being sold, but it is supported by XM, so if you buy one on eBay or Craig’s List or whatever, you can call up XM and subscribe, or add the device to your existing subscription for $5/month.
The device comes with XM’s software to drive it, but there’s a third-party solution called TimeTrax which allows you to save the XM streaming audio to your hard drive as MP3 files.
Doing so is legal under fair-use, just like recording FM to cassette is.
XM doesn’t have an NPR channel, but they do have XM Public Radio, channel 133, which does have content from American Public Radio, Public Radio International, Boston’s WBUR, George Washington University, and National Geographic. NPR has an exclusive contract with Sirus satellite radio, but that might change if/when they merge with XM.
I’d be happy to talk more about this solution, should anyone desire further info. The main limitation is obtaining XMPCR devices on the secondary market, but they are out there, and the price has come down since the “rush” when TimeTrax made news a while back.
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If you like XM radio, try the AOL Radio online – they stream some of the XM radio stations for free. A free AOL/AIM screen name is required for some stations, but it may be a good alternative.
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