Re: Cognitive dissonance
I actually paid the subscription service.
Was a long time user of Google Music, I loved being able to upload my music to the service and be able to stream it at work or my phone on the go. Eventually I ponied up for the premium service as it was worth $9.99/m (AUD) for access to pretty much every record that wasn't in my collection and hey, free YouTube Red thrown in (when it started) so good bye YouTube ads, nice.
Then came the push to YouTube Music, an absolutely crippling of the UI to make it more like Spotify or whatever (which is a tech trend I still don't follow, you have program X, you're doing ok, program Y comes out, it's popular, so you redesign your service to be a half Frankenstein of it, no one will switch to you because it offers nothing more than what they already have, existing customers leave because it's no longer what they wanted). Eventually my uploaded music disappeared altogether and I'm left with the poor Spotify impersonator.
Now they want to up the fee to $16.99 a month (AUD) from the $9.99 I was paying, yeah, nah, feck off.. I was already disgruntled, now you've pushed me out. Just like Netflix when they stopped me sharing my account with my friends, hey, I wasn't really watching it, but happy to pay it so my mates can, now they can't, well, that's a subscription you've lost (and the top tier 4k one at that).
I went off and found Plexamp, ironically, it gives me access to all my media on the go, at work or stream to my phone, and, with a $10.99/m (AUD) subsidised Tidal subscription, I have access to all the albums not in my collection - so now I'm back to what I wanted, paying about the same, and Google can go fuck themselves, it's not like they're sitting on billions and actually needed to up the price in the first place.