Yeah. It's not horribly outrageous if you go for the annual plan, but it still kinda sucks. I can see the potential benefit, that the song selection might be more eclectic since you don't have to only make songs that you know will sell as DLC, but it also means paying for a shitton of songs I don't care about and have no intention of playing. I have seen in the past when they pick songs from a band that aren't their best guitar songs but are the bigger hits, just because you need people to buy the songs to make it worth it.
Paying monthly though is insanely high. Like, it's hard to imagine that it's worth as much as HBO Max.