Some more clarification:
GHTV is free.
You never have to pay a dime if you don't want to.
You can, forever, just play whatever the service has on at the time. There will, presumably outside of the Avenged Sevenfold preorder bonus, never be a time where you cannot play a song.
If you want to pick a song to play, you either:
- Spend a token you have earned playing GHTV
- Spend real life money to acquire a token to pick a song.
You get tokens by:
- Playing the game, and you get more every day
- Playing a song
- Being better than other players at a song
What's the problem here? You're never locked out of GHTV. You're never forced to pay for anything. It's literally no worse than Spotify, Groove, Pandora, Apple Music. The game isn't based around a traditional DLC model anymore, it's based on music discovery services.
From day one you have over 250 songs to play, just for the entry cost of the game. I think there's some misconception over having to pay to play, when that is never the case.