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Is Netflix really the only site which does this nearly-braindead machine learning approach?

Once you realize that people have different tastes and you know someone's preferences that is the obvious solution. Or is the process of crawling through that much statistical data that expensive that it can only be offered to paying subscribers?

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The more accurate you want to get, the more computationally expensive. Netflix actually did a contest with a million dollar prize to the team that could come up with the most accurate rating prediction algorithm. In the end, the million dollar algorithm was too expensive to implement, so they never ended up using it.

rateyourmusic.com sort of has this, but it's not in the default view. You have to go to an album and click a "View my suggested rating" button, then it whirs for a few seconds before giving you an average of ratings from users with similar taste. It would be much more useful to browse the whole site with those ratings showing, but I get the feeling it's a computationally expensive feature.

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