Josh Evitt

I've been a customer of Yahoo! Music Unlimited for about six months now. Up until about a month ago, I was really happy with the service. They have a great selection of music at a great price of $4.99/mo for the yearly plan. I use it all the time at work.

However, my problem lies with their customer support. Originally, I signed up for the month-to-month plan, which is $6.99/mo. After about four months, I decided I liked it enough to go ahead and sign up for a full year. Their music interface is fairly easy to use, but after that it gets really confusing. For example, IMing a song to a friend is not intuitive at all. The help system is almost useless. I searched for a way to upgrade my account. There was no information anywhere about doing this, so I decided to e-mail customer support asking if I could upgrade my account. The reply I received said (emphasis mine):

On Oct 21, I received an e-mail from Yahoo! Music indicating a price change for transferring music to a portable device, effective Nov. 1. They were doubling the cost of the subscription to transfer music. I decided that it was time to go ahead and get the annual subscription. My monthly subscription was due for a bill payment on Oct 31, so I decided to wait until a little closer to then before canceling and renewing. On Oct. 29 without much thought and following the advice they gave me, I canceled my monthly subscription and attempted to renew for a year. However, I was unable to renew because my monthly subscription did not expire until Oct 31. All I wanted to do was renew my account for an annual subscription before Oct 31 to take advantage of the pricing at that time.

I immediately e-mailed their support explaining what I was trying to do. A while later, I received a reply that made it obvious that they didn't even read my e-mail. So, I immediately e-mailed them back re-explaining to them what happened and including the previous e-mail that I sent. At this point, I started getting a little nervous because I wanted to be sure that I was able to renew in time to receive a year under the previous pricing plan, which would save me about $60 if I wanted to transfer music to an MP3 player. I waited, and waited, and waited. I tried a few more times to renew my subscription with no luck. Finally, on Nov. 1 I was able to renew my subscription. Of course, conveniently, that was the day the new pricing scheme took effect so I have to pay $9.99/mo in order to transfer music to a portable device. I finally received an e-mail with a phone number for Yahoo! Billing questions, which is 408-349-5151 (which is not listed anywhere on their site that I could find and routes to India from what I can tell). I tried to explain my situation to the representative, but it was obvious that he didn't understand. He said he'd have a "supervisor" look over my question and get back in touch. I later received another canned response indicating that their was nothing they could do. I e-mailed, and then called again. Essentially, I was finally told that inside the e-mail on Oct 21 was a link to an upgrade site and I had to click that link and that they couldn't (wouldn't) do anything for me.

So, ultimately it was my fault for not carefully re-reading the e-mail before canceling my account. However, I just assumed that since they had already told me I had to cancel my account in order to upgrade, that that's what I needed to do. Furthermore, if they had read my e-mail sent on Oct 29 instead of sending a canned response, then maybe I could have known at that point that I just needed to create a new account and purchase the annual subscription. Instead, I'm left extremely frustrated by the whole (negative) experience and with a bad feeling about doing any further dealings with Yahoo.