Sirius XM

[Dave Lehnert]

I purchased a new Chevy and it came with 3 free months of Sirius XM. I'm at the end of the 3 months and need to renew if I want to keep it. I received an offer in the mail for 6 months for very, very cheap. My guess so they can get your card number and do the auto renew thing to lock you in.
I have been on a mission to not renew any magazine that does the auto renew thing. You know how it goes, You forget your end date than WHAM! locked into another two years. Happened to me on cable.

My question- I like the XM radio, not the auto renew thing. How is Sirius XM as a company to deal with? Do they play tricks or good to deal with?

[mark leishman]

As off late i think they are poor. They have been changing the line up on
Channels have done away with stuff i listened to regulary.
They dont seem to have a looked in contract can just call and cancel

[Rich Riddle]

You don't get locked in for years after the introductory rate. You go on the month-to-month plan which is quite high. The most they get you for is one month if you forget. I call just before expiration to ensure I don't go month-to-month.

[Myk Rian]

I feed the system music from my phone with Bluetooth.
We never re-upped Sirius.

[Matt Meiser]

Are they still charging the royalty fee? Last offer I got that about doubled the advertised rate.

Pandora makes them obsolete IMHO if it's music you want.

[Dave Lehnert]

Are they still charging the royalty fee? Last offer I got that about doubled the advertised rate.

Pandora makes them obsolete IMHO if it's music you want.

Thanks, Just the kind of info I was looking for. Extra fees etc.....

[Matt Meiser]

Actually I should have said last offer I got that I actually opened the envelope. Been throwing them away unopened for a couple years.

[Dick Latshaw]

Pandora makes them obsolete IMHO if it's music you want.

Does Pandora have a satellite connection?

[Lee Schierer]

If you decide to get it, wait until the telemarketers call you and no matter what they offer tell them you want to cancel and get transferred to customer service. When they ask you what the problem is tell them it costs too much for your needs. And ask for an annual rate for one year. They will agree to something around $8-9 per month after a while. Then what ever you do don't give them a credit card, ask for a paper bill. It will cost $2 for the paper billing, but they won't be able to automatically bump your rate next year when it expires.

The telemarketers can't offer more than certain rates. Customer service has better deals than they give tot eh telemarketers, who are not Sirius employees, just telemarketers working on commission.

[John Lohmann]

Let it expire, they will lower the rate. We have never paid more than $5 a month

[Adam Cruea]

For me, the price of the multi-year subscription is worth it, but I'm starting to wonder.

I hate listening to people blabbing on the public stations, and I don't want to pay for the data plan on a monthly basis to cover the cost of all that data coming down to my phone. Not to mention, if you go into an area without coverage, you lose your Pandora connection. SXM works anywhere as long as you have a view of the southern sky. Cell phones only have consistent data transfer rates as long as the carriers keep up with demand and add enough towers and provide good coverage.

Then there's also using your phone for Pandora makes it so that you have to use a car adapter to power the phone. That costs money, too. And FYI, Pandora has a pay option to take out the constant ads. Pandora One.

[Eduard Nemirovsky]

I did have a very difficult time to cancel my automatic renewal. And I did have a three cars with Sirius or XM ( before they bought each other). After it become an one company I called a few times trying to combine my accounts and asked for cheeper rates. Doesn't not work. Just cancel all after at least 6 years of use.
Now I am using BT from iPhone on one car ( with Pandora or iCloud music), hard drive with all my music on another, iPod on the third one.
Good luck with your Sirius XM.
Ed.

[Fred Chan]

I just got my renewal invoice. $175+11 for royalty fee for 1year. Total including tax is $218.88. XM is OK but I don't like it for that much. If you really like satellite radio the best bet is the lifetime price at the start when they phone you to try to get you to sign up. Don't give them your credit card, insist on paying by cheque.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

I use both XM and Pandora One, and far prefer XM usually. It's instantaneous and easy. Pandora takes some fiddling to get to work. I use Pandora on the treadmill so I can just plug the headphones in and go, and pick a genre to stick with. The adds on regular Pandora are too much. XM has far more options, never looses signal. I hate calling XM, their customer support is such a pain. I don't remember my account password, I'm not going to commit that memory to do it, quit asking! Once we get past that, it works fine. I have multiple accounts, my wife gets one in her car, and lately she has been complaining about loosing stations too.

I've never had XM auto renew anything. I buy the yearly subscription, maybe thats why.

[Matt Meiser]

I just start the Pandora app on my phone and it goes. Same with our home theater receiver.

I do pay $39/yr for an account. Daughter was listening to it every day on the bus and burned through her 750MB limit in about 3 weeks. I'd guess that adding 2GB of data would be enough for most commuters. On Verizon that's $10/month so a total of $159/yr with a couple big advantages in that you build your own "stations" can skip songs (within limits) and rate songs to hone your stations. And you can use it anywhere you take your phone or listen through a web browser on a PC. I've used it in rental cars numerous times. We don't use all the data we have, and had before I used Pandora so I don't count that as part of my cost.

Disadvantages are getting it connected to a car without some kind of headphone, USB, or Bluetooth interface and that if you don't have cell service, you don't get music. I haven't found the latter to be a practical problem. We drove from Michigan to Kansas City via Iowa then home via St. Louis and never lost service. Didn't use a particularly large amount of data that month either.

At home I listen to it while mowing. The only glitch I see is when I get out of wifi range and switch to LTE--sometimes it will quit one song and start another, maybe 1-2 times per mowing session. Was thinking about a cheap outdoor access point with only our devices allowed access to solve that "issue" so it would stay on Wifi, but data usage patterns seem to say its not an issue.

[Jim Becker]

If want to renew with them, do it over the phone and get them to send you a paper bill to pay with a US Postal money order. ;) That way, you're not caught in the auto-payment thing upon renewal.

I had the service free for a year with my Grand Cherokee. I listened to audio exactly twice--horrible quality, high compression, etc.. The only part of the service I miss is the traffic information it can supply to my NAV system and I may subscribe to that separately if I decide to bring it back online. For tunes, I have a library of over 3000 songs on my iPhone that I stream via Bluetooth when traveling.