This afternoon, Yahoo! sent me a friendly reminder that my Yahoo Music Unlimited annual subscription is up for renewal in a month. I had signed up for Yahoo Music right when it came out a couple years ago and I must admit it’s been an awesome companion for me. Having access to well over a million songs across all kinds of genres has introduced me to a lot of new artists that I hadn’t been famliar with and also given me the chance to listen to the full albums of artists I already was a fan of. The downside is that the Yahoo Music application is pretty slow and clunky. Also, while the star-rating recommendation system does an OK job at pushing me music that might fit my taste, it would be nice to have more help, such as having some better social features or more editorial content.

After reading reviews about other music subscription services that have launched over the past couple of years, I thought I’d do some quick research before renewing. A couple of my friends have Rhapsody and say really great things about the service. Also, in this CNET review from a couple weeks ago, they named Rhapsody their Editor’s Choice amongst competing services. One of the best features of Rhapsody is the team of music editors which write commentary on the various artists and genres. Rhapsody does cost a little bit more but the difference is only a few dollars a month. I became really tempted to make the switch - if for no other reason than to have a change of scenery.

Then it hit me. I have now rated over 2k songs, artists, and albums on Yahoo Music. Those ratings represents thousands of hours of music listening for me and represent a deep description of my music taste. When browsing music it helps me sort out music that I have and have not listened to. Furthermore, in a sense I’m sort of proud of my ratings. I’ve put in a lot of time creating those ratings and since my music taste is a big part of my identity, hence my music ratings are a big party of my identity. I don’t want to lose those ratings. As is typical of big portal sites, there’s no way to export my music rating data. In all fairness though, import/export is not supported by any of the services and since they presumably use different music databases, it’s not even clear if an import/export could reliably be done.

The bottom line is that I don’t want to lose my ratings so the switching cost for me is impossibly high (I’d have to manually transfer my ratings one-by-one).
It turns out that there is actually a very good reminder here for consumer services. The deeper a customer can personalize the service, the higher the switching cost is.

Anyway, in conclusion, for the time being I’m Yahoo Music’s bitch. I’ll be renewing for another year…