a.k.a. V.J.

One of the concepts I’ve taught in my consumer behavior course over the years is “cognitive lock-in.” That refers to a type of customer loyalty that can exist with technology products, wherein the user gets comfortable with the particulars of an interface over time and is reluctant to switch to a competitor simply because they don’t want to expend the effort to learn a new one. I could be a poster boy for cognitive lock-in. I’m usually not fond of changes to my daily routine, and if the change requires me to adopt some new technology, I can get downright grouchy about it.

Yesterday, I received notice that such a change is being forced upon me. Stitcher, the app I have been using for the past six or seven years to listen to all my podcasts, has informed me that they are going belly-up in August. That might not sound like that big of a deal, and of course it isn’t, but I do listen to a lot of podcasts. Currently, I subscribe to 24 different shows, and at any given time there are 4 or 5 others that I dip in and out of. I’d estimate that on average, I listen to about 10-12 hours of podcast content per week — way more than that during weeks when Dan Carlin has dropped a new Hardcore History episode. That’s a lot of time invested in a particular interface.

I have no particular fondness or preference for Stitcher. I only chose it over the many other option available because, at one time, Stitcher’s premium membership tier was the only way to access certain episodes of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, which I really couldn’t live without. Once I started with it, it didn’t take long for the aforementioned cognitive lock-in to take hold. Stitcher made a few changes to their interface over the years that made the user experience noticeably worse, but I stubbornly stuck with it. The fact that they are ceasing operations leads me to speculate that perhaps many other listeners were not so locked in and moved on after those “upgrades” that felt much more like downgrades.

So, now I’m in the market for a new podcast app. (Know, Gentle Reader, that the profound weirdness of the previous sentence is not lost on me.) I suspect that they are all largely commodity products without much functional difference between them. I’ll probably go with Spotify, simply because I have an account and the app is already on my phone. The upside to this is it will give me an opportunity to re-evaluate the roster of shows I listen to, prune out some of the ones that have grown stale, and perhaps discover some new favorites. Until then, I shall grumble under my breath about forced change.