Anna Rinaggio, Campus Carrier opinions editor
Netflix, Costco, Amazon Prime and Spotify. What do all of these things that many of us consider practically essential to our daily lives have in common? They are some of the seemingly endless number of services we must pay a subscription for in order to use.
Subscriptions used to be so simple. 10 years ago, Netflix was the $8 ad-free streaming experience that we were all raving about. You could get a pass to the zoo and go as many times as you wanted throughout the year. Amazon Prime allowed you to get unlimited fast and free shipping on a plethora of the platform’s products. Subscriptions weren’t a part of every-day life — they were much more of a luxury that relatively fewer services required.
In 2024, it seems like just about everything you encounter, especially on the internet, has a subscription requirement for use of its services. News media sites want you to pay extra to read their articles. Every video streaming service requires a basic subscription, and if you want an ad-free experience, you have to pay an additional $5 a month for the “premium” subscription. Places like Costco require a paid membership to even enter the store; on top of what you’re going to spend on groceries, you’re basically paying an entrance fee to be in their exclusive club.
Music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music are perhaps the one subscription-based platform that got it right. You pay $10 a month to listen to as many songs, podcasts and music videos as you want. If you listen to and download a ton of music, this is certainly more cost-effective than paying for each song individually. Furthermore, there’s no “basic” or “premium” plan that dictates how many songs you can listen to or whether or not you can listen to the exclusive content. You pay a basic subscription and get as much out of it as you want.
Beyond that, subscription-based services have gotten out of control. Requiring a subscription to use a service is one thing, but creating tiered subscriptions is ridiculous. The idea behind streaming services such as Netflix used to be that, unlike cable, you paid for a service where you could watch what you wanted at any time without the annoying interruption of ads. Now, the “basic” subscription for these same services include ads and sometimes bar you from certain shows that only come with a pricier subscription. At this point, it’s basically the same as cable, which takes away from the whole point of paying for a luxury service in the first place.
Worst of all, subscription-based companies are so hungry for money that they’re starting to police who can use the account. Netflix, for example, is cracking down on how many devices can access an account, and if you want to watch its content away from home, you have to pay for a higher subscription. One would think that they have enough money from the millions of subscribers who pay for the services every month, but apparently, a college student watching a show on their family’s account from their dorm room is something that needs to be stopped.
Is it really too much to ask to not have to pay month by month for every little thing we do? Sometimes you want to read an article out of simple curiosity, but you can’t get more than two sentences in before a pop up appears on the screen telling you that the article is locked until you pay the $4.99 subscription fee for “unlimited access to all of our content.” Why pay the subscription if you’re not going to use the website on a regular basis?
Paying a subscription for a service makes sense if you’re going to get more out of the experience than the average non-paying user, but having to pay for a basic service is pointless. We’re getting to a point where consumers have to pay a subscription fee for more things than they can keep track of, and that’s tiring. Perhaps someday this system will fade away, but for now, it seems that we will have to continue paying month-by-month for the many services we use every day.