[depereo]

I had Red through my google play music subscription but then they turned music into a YouTube nonsense app that removed features I liked and tripled the costs.

I'd subscribe to YouTube premium if it didn't bundle a music subscription and associated cost.

[Thorrez]

>tripled the costs.

According to this article, when Youtube red was introduced in October 2015, it was $9.99/month. It's now $13.99/month. That's a 40% increase. If you adjust $9.99 in October 2015 for inflation to September 2023, it's $12.93/month. So inflation-adjusted, the price increased 8.2% from 2015 to now.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9566973/youtube-red-ad-f...

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=9.99&year1=201...

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Youtube.

[SoullessSilent]

Your calculation doesnt take into account increases in income. As mine has not increased since before 2015 then that would still be a 40% increase to me.

[Thorrez]

Are you interested in

* Increases in income of the population then vs now, which would be good for comparing the economy then vs now (e.g. median income then vs now)

* Increases in income following cohorts, which would be good for see how on average individual people's income has risen due to both the economy and gained experience (e.g. 25 year old in 2015 would be 33 now, and thus likely make more money both due to population-wide changes (e.g. inflation) and due to having more work experience)

* Increases in income of a few individual people (the example you provided)

For the first one, this page[1], says that in 2021 dollars, the median US household income was $68410, and in 2022 (also in 2021 dollars) it was $74580. So adjusting those back to their in-year dollars, that would be $61,426.62 in 2015[2] and $86,662.50 in 2023[3]. So adjusting the Youtube Red/Premium price change, to those numbers, results in Youtube Red/Premium decreasing price by 0.7% once adjusted for the US population's medium household income.

For the second one, I think adjusting for that would should the price decreasing even more. Because each individual person's experience increases, so you would expect an individual's income to increase more than the population's income.

For the third one, I don't see how it's useful to look at a few examples. One person's income might have doubled, showing the Youtube Red/Premium dropped drastically in price. Another person's income might have halved, showing Youtube Red/Premium increases drastically in price. Another person might have become unemployed, showing Youtube Red/Premium's price increased by infinity %. Another person might have gone from unemployed to having a job, showing Youtube Red/Premium's price decreases from infinity % of income to non-infinity % of income, so basically a decrease by inifnity %.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

[2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=68410&year1=20...

[3] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=74580&year1=20...

[OkGoDoIt]

I’m still grandfathered into my $7.99 per month plan. They did not raise the cost for existing subscribers. Which is the only reason I still subscribe. Google Music went away and YouTube Music is a mess so now I use Apple Music. I would not pay full price for YouTube premium but for $8 a month I can kind of justify keeping it. I kind of want to cancel it since I don’t actually use YouTube very often, but I know I’ll never be able to get back my grandfathered $8/month plan so I don’t cancel it. Yay loss aversion.

[Thorrez]

Interesting. When did you first sign up? When you first signed up, was it YouTube Red or something else? Did it remove YouTube ads?

[depereo]

In my local currency it used to be the equivalent of $5.83 USD, with price increases and exchange rate changes it had tripled by 2019 from when I signed up to google play music in 2013.

[Thorrez]

>when I signed up to google play music in 2013.

Google Play Music didn't remove Youtube ads back then. Youtube Red wasn't created until 2015. So you're comparing the price of something that didn't remove Youtube ads to the price of something that does remove Youtube ads. That's not a fair comparison.