A sad thing happened when I tried to log into SiriusXM on my iPad this morning – I was greeted with the message above. So I tried the other account I had grabbed when I posted about it a couple of weeks ago.
I had used Sirius for the 6 month trial that came with my car, but couldn’t justify the $9.99 monthly (back in 2007) fee – particularly as we moved and I changed from a hour commute to a fifteen minute drive. But I knew there was loads of cool stuff, so when I had the chance to grab the year ‘trial’ I did! My family still mostly uses Slacker, but I had just started playing with SiriusXM over the weekend, and was pleased to see that Dan was doing the same.
Sadly that has all ended … and is not coming back. And appparently I am not alone, as I just stumbled across another person with the same problem over at the Consumerist. They include an email reply from SiriusXM who said
“bogus codes had been put out onto the internet” and that “those codes that were distributed were turned into 7-day trials.”
Personally I have mixed feelings about this – on the one hand the code was clearly not intended for general use (or we wouldn’t have been declared ‘winners’), so I wouldn’t have even called customer service. But on the other hand, to have sent out these emails with all of the details and then simply turn them into the lowest possible trial seems … like a bad PR move. I can grab a 30 day trial on their site without any special code, so why not do SOMETHING to make this positive? Also, these were not ‘bogus codes’ – the issue was that the contest was over, and no one from SiriusXM did anything until they saw a glut of sign-ups.
What do you think? Should SiriusXM have honored the 1-year deals? Or converted them to 6 months … or to 3 months … or to 30 days? Or were they right in dropping to 7 day trials? And what do you think of the idea that this was a ‘fake leak’ done intentionally to grab emails and get loads of downloads for their iOS/Android apps (and therefore visibility and bragging rights)?