Problem is I have this fantasy of being 95 years old and proudly showing my great great grandchildren how I get YT Music/Premium for $8 instead of the $695 everyone else pays.
That imagined sense of superiority from getting a good deal is pretty much the only thing that keeps me going some days.
I thought they went up for everyone? You're still paying 8? I was paying 10 for the past like 8 years and mine just went into 14 last month. I opted for the yearly plan at $140 so it's 11.66/mo so it lessened the blow. I envy you if you're still paying 8.
If I remember right, people who had YouTube premium got grandfathered in at a lower price, but that lower price didn't last forever and recently went up.
However people who signed up early for play music all access were told they would get an $8 a month price for signing up early, and that price has persisted until now through all the other price hikes and the change to YT Music.
I signed up for Google play music/YouTube red I believe in 2015 when I got my nexus 6P. It was 10 a month then and I've been grandfathered till now. When the prices went up last summer, I was told I had another 6 months or so to keep my grandfathered price before mine would go up as well. Did the OG 8 dollar users not get that email?
I signed up back when it was “Google Play Music” and was locked into that deal as well. I didn’t want to lose it, but I wanted to upgrade to a family plan. Customer support promised me that if I upgraded, my family plan price would continue to be honored for just as long as the individual plan price.
Spoiler: they lied.
I had my account using a unique-per-service card with a monthly cap and it started rejected their billing attempts when, about a year ago, they abruptly increased my plan price to nearly double what I had been paying.
I had already been using uBlock Origin and Tidal via Plex (even though I don’t actually use Plex, but when I signed up I hadn’t yet decided to use Jellyfin), since I despise the YT Music UI, so for me there wasn’t much of a change.
That said, if you like YT Music / YT Premium then by all means stick with it. The creators of the videos you watch get comped better when you watch them than when a free user does - that was the main reason I kept my subscription for as long as I did.