"We’re gradually going to shut down Google Play Music, the Music Store on Google Play and Music Manager soon, with everyone losing access in the months to come. You can read our full announcement here. This announcement follows the launch of our new migration process (back in May) which lets all Google Play Music listeners easily transfer their data and make the simple switch to YouTube Music"
Interestingly, no mention of the new requirement to pay $9.99 pm to listen to your own music in the background, or the fact that ads will play on previously purchased tracks without becoming a premium subscriber.
I'm also on Android in Europe, with no YouTube Music subscription, and it lets me play music in the background, without ads, if it's either on the device or in the "Uploads" section (which is where it's put music I'd purchased on Google Play Music). So it looks like they haven't completely removed that functionality, although the interface for accessing it is significantly more annoying.
Google Play Music wasn't very popular, but it was surprisingly good. YouTube Music is ok, but it lacks that quality without a name and has many small glitches that make it much less pleasant to use.
No, its quite bad. In addition to being flat-out buggy (I've had it multiple times in the last week just decide to switch to a playlist it invented rather than the one it was directed to play), it doesn't support basic music playing functionality like song or playlist repeat, and (surprisingly) its Google Assistant integration is awful, forcing you to use casting from a different device for basic tasks with an Assistant-powered speaker.
What platform are you on. because I know for a fact that you can repeat individual songs, and playlists on the Android app. I'm also wondering about the casting, since I regularly cast (again from the Android app) to my minis at home.
> What platform are you on. because I know for a fact that you can repeat individual songs, and playlists on the Android app.
That's...bizarre.
I'm on Android, and the repeat icon, which I know for a fact was not showing up in the app on my phone any time from when I was forced to use because Google Play Music stopped working on my home speakers through last night, is now showing up. (And, while there is an new update to the app, I haven't installed it yet, so its not an app update.)
> I'm also wondering about the casting, since I regularly cast (again from the Android app) to my minis at home.
Casting works fine from the app (well, playlist bugs excluded), the problem is having to cast from the app for lots of simple tasks where voice commands worked for GPM. As music is part of the bedtime routine for my toddler and preschooler, having everything suddenly be much less straightforward has been...unpleasant.
And you cannot play a single song that you've just searched, everything is in an auto-generated playlist. Including normal YT videos that it detects as music just because there are some music playing in it. It's awful and I won't make the switch. My subscription ends when GPM dies.
The playlists behavior (once they finally let us import them) isn't great, so I've been using the "Your Mix" feature a lot. It's pretty good, but there are a couple songs I've Thumbs Downed that keep popping up in my mix anyway.
Bad UI + incredibly simple, stupid things like that drive me crazy. Google Music wasn't great, but it was far better tha YouTube Music.
When they first released it like 9 years ago, it was great. I still had my Droid Incredible, and the fact that I could upload all my offline music to their cloud and listen to it from wherever...was a dream.
How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years. While Apple have a single message service (iMessage) and a single music service (Apple Music) that have been consistently branded with constant growth and show no signs of being shut down?
As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products. It’s a major turn off.
So there's iTunes (2001-2019, but arguably renamed to Apple Music, so not actually dead), and Ping (2010-2012), the latter of which had approximately three users.
Like for like, Google Play Music (2011-2020) isn't quite as long-lasting, but more to the point, I'm not sure Apple has simultaneously maintained two competing services before ultimately canceling one.
Then the GP commenter mentioned "chat services," which makes the position unassailable. Google seems to have launched and folder a dozen or two chat services over time[1].
The blue and green chat bubbles are the sender’s chat bubbles, not the receiver’s. So it’s the iPhone user with the colored bubbles, non-iPhone receives and iPhone receivers are white/gray.
You can make and receive FaceTime calls from any recent Apple device to any recent Apple device (e.g. Mac to iPhone) which is nice, but FaceTime’s real advantage is call quality. It’s noticeably more clear and seems to handle poor/unstable connections much better.
I can FaceTime with people halfway around the world with more clarity than I can talk to someone on the same WiFi network using WhatsApp.
It has a couple of really good use cases as it works on non-phones (macs and ipads). Little kids and some older people don’t have phones. I like the bigger screen for non-casual video calls.
Also, I was on a project with a colleague who had a poor internet connection and we found FT worked better than zoom. FT video quality seems to be the best of the services I’ve used but personally I don’t care about this part much.
I wouldn’t call these “killer features” but they are enough, with the integration into address book etc, to make it flourish.
What the person you’re replying to means, is that Apple Music was added on top of iTunes as a new service rather than iTunes being scrapped completely. If Google were to do the same thing, then google play music would still be around and not be getting killed in favor of youtube music.
That’s a fair point. Though in this case aren’t google play music and youtube music substantially similar services?
Google’s reputation is that they will have 2-3 services with the same functionality. Whereas there are pretty legitimate business reasons you want want to make a streaming business distinct from a legacy content purchasing business.
Also I just happened last week to rip in Apple Music some of my teenager years CD before packing and storing them.
This is still an option. Likewise the playlists I created on the go on my iPod Nano in a 2008ish trip reliably got migrated from versions to versions up until now.
Agreed that it is annoying, but its interesting to look back at how we got here. Google Play Music (GPM) launched in 2011. To get music on here, I'm guessing that team had to sign contracts with the various publishers and record studios. The onboarding and licensing terms of those were likely entirely around this music streaming service.
Then you have Youtube. It's been a video hub for anything, and other those 9 years since GPM launched, it has become a place where lots of people listen to music (watching music videos or the like). You have companies like Vevo that publish music content there. I'd guess Youtube has different contracts with those companies that have evolved over time about how music can be played.
So over these past 9 years, 2 products that had little overlap, have started to overlap more and more. As youtube expanded, it started butting into GPM's world. That likely was odd for Google for contracts and licensing of that content. Youtube Music (YTM) likely allows them to do it all under one silo now. Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM.
I assume so. Spotify has a feature somewhat like this, but I keep it turned off because I find it annoying and distracting. It’s a bit silly to try to justify a huge move like this based on such a trivial feature, in my opinion.
I'm not sure I follow really. Any music player I've used plays in the background. I throw in some headphones and it plays without the screen being on. I'm not really sure how else it can go in the background but I know I'm missing something. lol
> Play videos on your mobile device while using other apps or when your screen is off. Background play is available on YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids mobile apps (if these apps are available in your location).
They only allowed background play on Youtube with a subscription.
I believe it's a subscription feature for YouTube Music as well. The link you provided indicates that this requires a YouTube Premium subscription, though a bit more digging on that page and https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/6313552?hl=en suggests that the minimum required subscription is actually YouTube Music Premium (this is included as part of YouTube Premium).
Hah, just like Porsche having an idea of more horsepower for a monthly fee (or pay per fun afternoon's drive) or Musk's self-driving subscription idea, now it's "Pay if you want to be able to browse Instagram while listening to music"/pay if you want to be able to turn your screen off.
Friend of mine who isn't me still downloads MP3s on torrents and has no cloud subscriptions. I'm sure he's smug about this.
I've often wondered about what percent of battery drain on smartphones is directly attributable to this business model choice and therefore exactly how many smartphones have ended up in landfills before they needed to because Google ultimately prioritizes a few dollars over the environment.
I'm not sure why the licensing would impact the app in any way. They could swap the backend, keeping the better app. The background video is just one feature to add compared to trying to fix the YTM many problems.
Point taken. Maybe this was just one of many factors? I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
I definitely had friends that used Youtube as a poor-mans spotify and would just keep the videos playing in the background on their desktop.
> I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
If it's the way they did, it was one of the worst ways anyone could think of. It baffled me how so many smart minds can work at Google and take so many terrible decisions at the same time.
This was just one in several equally stupid decisions they did. They could have dominated the messaging market by now, but they threw out that chance several times.
Sometimes I think it might have been on purpose. Maybe they are afraid to dominate too many markets at the same time and avoid a anti trust lawsuit? Because otherwise it literally makes no sense. Either this or they need to feed their stupid hierarchical loop giving senseless promotions to whoever creates a new thing that nobody asked for by destroying another thing that people were starting to use and like.
Contracts seem like a very weird motivation for this. Why completely overhaul the user experience by getting rid of an entire application for consuming music and trying to shoehorn it into another, instead of just keeping two separate entities with separate licenses?
Even if the motivation makes some sense, the user experience is worse and I have very little faith that Google will maintain YTM long enough that I should invest in using it. The way Google does things means that in five years it will probably be on its way out in favor of the next rebrand that will get some product manager a promotion. Spotify, meanwhile, is still kicking after 10 or so years with no signs of slowing down or forcing users into a completely different app. i’ll stick with that, personally.
I just read that YTM has only 256 bit AAC just like YouTube. Going down in audio quality is a step in the wrong direction. There's just no point in installing 5G in so many countries when the encoding bit rates are going down for services.
Non audiophiles don't require more than 256kbps which is about the highest you can do for AAC anyway. Sure 320kbps can on some occasions be better on consumer hardware but I am not sure most will notice a difference.
So maybe 320kbps but I am really skeptical of people who need more.
Obviously there is a lot more to digital audio than bitrate.
I’m absolutely not an audiophile and I don’t know what Spotify does, but their audio quality has gone down the drain of late. I suspect streaming services are all trying hard to reduce costs by converging towards quality levels similar to what we had with FM radio and early MP3s, i.e. pretty shit overall but good enough to feel that pop/dance “phat bass”.
Pretty sure I remember Hydrogen Audio did a bunch of ABX tests that showed nobody (including so-called "golder ears") could distinguish 160kbps (or maybe it was 192) VBR MP3 from uncompressed - assuming a good encoder was used.
>Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM
It doesn't. It forces you to watch videos (if you're steaming to your home stereo or other casting enabled device) and prioritizes the video versions of everything, even if the video isn't officially from the artist and us just some random person's resubmission.
The user experience is almost impossibly terrible. It seems like the kind of curated experience one would concoct if they were trying to prank someone with an intentionally frustratingly hostile UX.
I have the opposite frustration here, where I queue up some music videos on my TV and inevitably after 1-2 songs, I'm staring at static album covers when I know there's an awesome music video that should be playing instead
> but its interesting to look back at how we got here.
Oh, please, I worked at Google as well, and this is typical Google’s inability to have attention span and coherent leadership for anything longer than 6 months. One VP did one thing, then another one another, then it turned out that it’s stupid and inconsistent. As. with. any. other. non-core product! Basically Google’s top leadership doesn’t care enough to impose coherent strategy across different divisions, and thing like this happen all the time (Android/Chrome OS, Chat/GVC/Hangouts/Allo/Duo/RCS/Meet, Gmail/Inbox, Nest/Google Home, and so on).
I am a personal gsuite user, and migrated multiple companies to gsuite over 10 years now (?). That means I tried to force everyone on to hangouts / chat / meet / duo / allo / etc etc. It's not just a turn off in a personal space. It's at the point I have given up on trying to get folks to standardize on google's products.
Google just did a slack competitor, but to click the screen share button (very common in slack to want to talk and screen share to collab) you are forced over in to meet land, which forces you out of your chat and defaults to video (not wanted). It's just such a total mess its totally incredible.
Ha, I remember my days trying to get friends and family to use Google services only to have them shutdown. No more. I tell them to stay far, far away from anything Google.
Apple has had iTunes, and for a time a music “social network” Ping. The original messaging tool was called iChat before it was iMessage. Apple has also had multiple Internet services that were more or less the same (iTools, .Mac, iCloud). Even Contacts used to be called Address Book, and Wallet used to be called Passbook.
Google still does worse but renaming things is pretty common.
That’s not quite right. Messages on iPhone was always messages. Mac’s version was called ichat and was separate. Apple then cancelled it and merged it into messages. Messages itself never had a name change and was always larger than ichat.
Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
>Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
That's actually an interesting point that I've never considered before, even though I was aware of it.
iTunes has always been kept separate from Apple Music, with no evident plans to merge those in sight, while Google Play Music was used for both streaming and purchasing music. I don't think it ultimately affected the demise of GPM, but it is still an interesting topic to ponder.
But as that article briefly mentions, the iTunes Store continues to exist and can be reached from the Apple Music app. I suspect this will change in a future macOS release, though I don't work for Apple and have no inside info.
In previous stories on here about Google's tendency to start stuff, shut it down arbitrarily, and compete with itself pointlessly, I recall seeing comments purporting to be from longtime Googlers saying that the reason this happens is at least in part due to Google's incentive structure. They reward people for creating "new" things, whether they're the same as something they've already got or not, and allocate very few resources for existing products that aren't already the company's bread and butter—getting put on something like Hangouts or Voice was considered to be almost a punishment detail, based on some of the comments I read, and could torpedo your chance at any kind of promotion.
> How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years.
It's not a rebrand. It's a rewrite. People need them promos.
In many cases, however, rewrites are actually warranted. As underlying infra gets replaced it becomes very expensive to run and maintain legacy services.
Rewrites are warranted, but rebranded every time you rewrite is not. Being able to replace core components while keeping the same brand and feature set is what takes real effort. Throwing everything out and making a completely different app with is imo a bit lazy and bad for the user.
If you truly must change things, gradual piece by piece changes is far prefered than complete 100% replacements like GPM -> YTM.
If they had slowly migrated GPM behind the scene to use Youtube over the years, and then after 2-3 years, just changed the name, I'm sure users would've been far less alienated.
I don’t think Google set up a predictable product iteration unveiling structure. One day I expect to see the PlayStation 6 for example, and one day I expect to see an update to the MacBook, and so on.
One day, do I expect to see an unveiling of a new Gmail UI? None of it is predictable because it feels like they do some serious a/b tests and just silently roll stuff out. They lack a structured presentation timeline. Currently users have no predictable expectations.
When that’s the case, just rename stuff, rebrand stuff, get rid of stuff, who the fuck cares. We didn’t promise the user updates, or even iterations, we simply promised them a one time product.
That’s the only thing that I can think of behind all of this. The simpler answer could just be their product team is not the best of the best for a company that works pretty hard at getting the best.
Your two examples at the top are both hardware, those work very differently. Websites used to do massive updates, but many have learned that it just leads to a lot of angry users. Slowly updating one component at a time works much better in my experience, and it's far less change for the user to adapt to at once.
I have a Pixel phone and pay for Google Play Music since I have a large collection that I have uploaded. It's been extremely disappointing. I have tried switching to Youtube Music but the interface sucks. I'm tempted to switch over to the iPhone since I'm already unhappy with Google in other areas (showing news articles repeatedly for health issues that I searched for one time, not allowing me to turn off gmail for a Google account on Pixel, etc). Google has become extremely user-hostile of late.
> As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products.
You are their product. They sell advertisers access to you. Everything else is a sideshow and they will eventually get bored with it and let it rot. Google has had a lot of good ideas over the years. They let devs create amazing things with the constant flow of ad dollars. But then those cool things don't make as much money as selling ads, and the devs want to move on to create a new thing, so the 300lb idiot baby that is Google wanders off and squats on something else.
I also have to wonder if Google is stuck in the doldrums of being a mid-life startup. Their initial team of rockstars have probably all retired to roll around in their millions. A whole new crop of money and status seeking folks have taken their place. Wall Street is expecting growth every quarter. There is constant pressure to refocus on revenue producers and grow the stock. They seem far detached from their initial roots under Sergey and Larry.
I'm a Google Play subscriber, and I'm pissed, because YouTube Music was always forcing videos on me, and was harder to use for offline listening (stopping music when I locked the screen, like other people).
What is better to switch to right now, YouTube Music, or Spotify?
I can't say I've had that experience, I've never had YT music throw a video at me. I've seen them listed as results in searches though. The YT Music move annoys me more because it all just seems like such a dumb waste of time, and Google is making me think and expend effort to service their corporate nonsense.
(for me, I'm sticking with YT Music over Spotify because you also get a YouTube Red subscription, and no ads on YouTube is worth it for me personally)
I moved my purchased music to YT Music in additional to having previously downloaded it but I am not super happy: the old model of buying a song or an album and then downloading it seems to no longer be an option in this craven new world - I guess they don't want my money if it does not arrive vassal-like in fixed monthly amounts.
Amazon doesn't allow HD music in their Linux client and unfortunately does not play nicely with the Google ecosystem. Shame too because I really liked it.
If you watch YouTube, then probably it's best to stick with Google since you get ad-free YouTube with your subscription (I think?) . Otherwise probably Spotify is better.
I have both Youtube and Google Play subscription, but never listen to Youtube music because the sound quality is quite bad. But now I'm getting really pissed:
Youtube Music has only 256kbit AAC compression...that's a no go for me. I tried Tidal once, but the user interface was very slow, so I unsubscribed.
I made the switch to Apple Music after GPM went on life support. It's got some weird UI choices (Apple conventions, I assume - I'm on Android), but I've been pretty happy with it, and it's more or less sold me on investigating how far an android user can invest in their cloud services ecosystem.
I avoid Spotify because I'm leery of their podcast play, especially given their employee's protests over the Rogan contract. Just because Rogan's too valuable an asset to compromise, doesn't mean they won't go after smaller podcasters.
Apple by contrast has been a fairly responsible steward of the podcasting ecosystem with its publicly available index, and hasn't attempted to exert undue control over individual podcasts beyond delisting them from their search engine.
I switched to Spotify and I'm pretty happy. It's a bit more buggy and some features are missing, but overall it's a decent replacement and I'm liking the playlists/radio more.
I entirely stopped using streaming services and now buy and download my music from Bandcamp, using webradios to discover new titles (my personal favorite is the webradio Nordic Lodge Copenhagen, SomaFM also has a lot of good thematic radios).
I don't have any trouble listening to my collection when internet gets spotty, I can have real full shuffle on my collection without hearing always the same titles coming again and again, and I'm guaranteed I own my music, with no-one able to take it from me. It feels like the future :)
I've done the same but my problem is that a lot of artists (labels?) only made their songs available to purchase on itunes and google music. Now there's only itunes which of course only works with the native app and doesn't have Linux support.
Well, as far as I'm concern, if they only provide content with DRM, then piracy is fair game. I pondered for a time if I should buy the content on abusive platforms and then download it illegally without DRMs, but I decided that respect must go both way. Just to be clear, I pay for a lot of music every week and I even give a lot every months to charities, this is not about money and my difficulty to part with it. Ultimately, I very rarely use piracy anyway because when I have to, I lose respect for artists and don't want to listen to them anymore (it's not me making it political, it's just a feeling that happens when I realize the artist will force spyware on me). The only content I download through piracy is from long dead artists, mostly (they didn't chose to only be available with DRM).
That being said, I've been surprised how common it is to find albums on Bandcamp or bands' own sites. It may be the music I listen to (I try to never limit me to a few "genres", but I very commonly listen to music with small audience). I guess fees asked by platforms have something to do with it too.
I was a google play music user since its inception and I switched to spotify. I paid 10$ for a tool to port over all my playlists, some which had over 800 songs. It was about 95% accurate so I'm a happy camper. Spotify's bread and butter is their music player so they're not going to cancel it anytime soon. lol
I moved to Spotify. Tried YTM which just a couple weeks ago lacked many basic features - you couldn't go from a song to the album listing or the artist page, you couldn't browse albums alphabetically, and many more - now it seems all those missing features are added. It actually looks decent now, so maybe I'll consider it in the future - but I'm already migrated now - they needed up the launch badly.
Google used to be the brand of cutting edge innovation and an optimistic technofuture...now they’re much more a brand of unreliable, half-baked ideas spread far too thin.
This is a bummer. I gather that I'm one of the few users of Google Play Music, so it's not surprising it's being killed. But it was one of the few streaming services that had the ability to upload your own music, a good catalog, and widespread device support.
YouTube music is OK, but worse in a bunch of respects. It separates out your uploaded music into a separate library (admittedly the matching in Play Music was always a bit wonky, but better than just giving up on the problem) which makes finding and managing music much more annoying. The UI is also really, really slow. Tt loads a single page of albums / songs / whatever at a time and takes a second to load the next one.
This can turn the process of scrolling through your albums, which has been effortless since iTunes debuted, into a multi-minute process. I've been hoping ever since they announced the switch that they would improve this stuff but it doesn't look like they've made any progress.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I'm thinking of putting my music in my Google Drive and using Plex (on a seedbox server). So my music is safe and accessible but I still need to pay for a streaming service because I like the discovery options they have.
I made the switch to plex because of the end of google music. You can get a tidal subscription through plex which has worked ok. It still separates your libraries, but you can create combined playlists.
Same boat here. I was a Google play music user for a long time, but switched to Spotify for good as soon as they announced YouTube music. The writing on the wall was there.
They've had years to fix all the issues people have had with this - and yet everyone still hates it (based on Reddit / App reviews). Playing music offline is broken, browsing playlists is insanely slow, and it lacks so many basic features of GPM/other services (like actual random shuffle and not a smart radio that plays the same 10 songs). Combining Youtube Likes with the music thumbs up makes no sense - I now have lecture videos that randomly play while trying to shuffle my library (that I guess Youtube somehow mistook as music). Even how it integrates with Google Assistant is terrible compared to the old product.
I understand why the switch to the new service was needed, from a license/business perspective. But no idea why they can't just listen to their users and at least match feature-wise the product it's supposed to replace.
I've lost faith in Google's ability to produce software and not just endlessly rebrand things.
There definitely doesn't seem to be a vision anymore - just product managers rebranding things for promotions. Pointless features like Soli are added to the Pixel then dropped next generation.
With any new market they are just failing completely - unable to make a smartwatch/VR/AR platform. DayDream VR / ARCore / WearOS are all now just examples of them just throwing stuff out there with no long term commitment
I haven’t heard a single consumer express enthusiasm for the switch to YouTube music. Anyone I’ve casually talked to about it is dismissive and doesn’t really understand what it's even trying to be. If anybody has heard anything from a user's perspective that is in favor of this, I would love to hear that argument. Otherwise I can only assume that this was a typical Google move where product people internally pushed for a rebrand to advance their own careers, at the expense of the user experience.
The story I’ve heard is that way more people are using YouTube for music listening than ever used Play Music, and that didn’t seem to be changing any time soon, so it doesn’t make sense to put any more resources toward Play Music.
I was a longtime Google Play Music All Access subscriber. One HUGE benefit that YouTube Music has is the available catalog. I like a lot of obscure music and remixes that no one else but YouTube has. I also agree that it's ridiculous that YouTube Music doesn't have all the features of Google Play Music. Still this was handled much better than most shutdowns where there is no migration path. I'm glad that Google is combining some redundant services. 5 more years and they might get their chat situation in order.
YouTube Music has the one feature I care about: A catalogue that includes everything from well-known music from top artists, to the random indie music that got a grand total of 10,000 views on YouTube when it was published 8 years ago.
Sure I could download these songs (assuming RIAA takes its teeth out of youtube-dl) and upload them to most music players, but YouTube Music facilitates discovery and does all the work for me.
Yea, as someone who listens to Nightcore/Japanese music, Youtube Music is by far the easiest way to listen and discover music. And the download offline feature has always worked great for me, a 100 songs uploads periodically to match what I've been listening to, so I don't run into the classic issue of using the same "I don't have service" music playlist.
Not that I don't get why people complain about the move (it is a dramatically different app), but Google is the only one with the actual usage numbers, and honestly I've never met someone who has used it. I'm guessing they weren't the best, while Youtube has some of the best usage numbers of any Western service.
It's great right now for you. You don't worry about Google deciding to go about things totally differently in 18 months and shut it down? I don't pay for Google products because they have a shorter shelf-life than a bottle of ketchup.
Too bad it has worse playlist management than freaking Windows Media Player from 2004. Seriously, I can't fucking find my playlists. I can't organize them. I can't search for them. I can't even easily create new ones by dragging multiple songs into them. And the icing on the cake is they get polluted with my decade old playlists from YouTube.
I absolutely detest YouTube music. It's only redeeming feature is a halfway decent radio and it's library ripped from YouTube proper. Everything else about is a worse user experience by almost every metric.
I was excited about the catalog until I tried to add Electric Lady Land, and they didnt have a legit version, just a fan made amalgamation of differntly mastered singles from the album. Honestly disappointing.
The switch to YouTube music was the last in a long chain of disappointments from Google, so two weeks ago I switched back to iPhone after 8 years of Android. I really, really wanted to like Android.
> Combining Youtube Likes with the music thumbs up makes no sense - I now have lecture videos that randomly play while trying to shuffle my library
If there was a way to say "no, this isn't music", this would be easily solved. But Google's fascination with "AI-only" solutions won't let that happen. (You'd think someone would be happy to have an extra source of training data!)
This is so unforgivable. A playlist can be what? A hundred songs? A thousand? Ten thousand? This is a few kilobytes of data at most. Something has gone seriously wrong if the Google infrastructure and a mobile device with > 1gb of RAM cannot manipulate this small amount of data properly.
I think you're a few orders of magnitude off. If each song has 100 bytes of metadata, which is a reasonable guess I think, then ten thousand songs costs a megabyte.
I mean, your point still stands, but it's more effectively made without the exaggeration I think.
I canceled after they screwed up the last service I liked and paid for from google.
I wish I could upload my music to spotify and redownload it again at will but otherwise its even offering the same decent suggestions, just went back to using adblock on youtube videos without a problem.
You kind of can do that with Spotify. It's not as transparent and convenient as Google Music was, but you can still listen to your own music files and bring them with you on a phone.
I use Amazon music because it lets you download DRM-free MP3s and lets me easily switch between iPhone and Android. I just wish it didn't reset to 'cloud' when I want it in 'offline' mode because I live in a patchy area.
Youtube Music has poor integration with my Google Assistant. I suspect many of the PMs do not use Google products at all or it would be readily apparent.
The big advantage is being able to play music from videos, which opens up a much larger catalogue.
I've used Google Play Music as the player for the mp3 files I've copied to my Android phone, ever since I got the phone. Never touched the online capabilities. It was perfect, did everything I wanted just the way I liked it. Then suddenly one day it was just gone.
Anybody have a recommendation for an mp3 player app that works mostly the same?
Although I've recently moved my library in to Plex, which handles sync between devices (you can set the app to copy some/all files to your phone storage). In addition to the Plex app, they also have Plexamp for a music-focused UX.
It's very nice if you're willing to put in a little setup effort.
And since you run the server, you know it will never be shut down on you.
I had the same experience. I just went in and the app does nothing. I had to disable updates and disable the app completely and find Vanilla Music Player to replace it.
I migrated to iBroadcast. It's free, and it seems to fit my fairly minimal needs. In particular, it allowed uploading everything I dumped from GPM (~7k tracks, apparently), and allows specifying which songs should always be available offline on an Android device. Presumably it has the usual streaming features and online music acquisition features as well, but I don't use any of them.
The client has an option that claims to do some normalization that I hoped would prevent large deltas in volume between tracks - in practice this seems worse than what I got from the GPM player. I mostly listen to long heterogenous playlists on shuffle, so this probably wouldn't matter to people who listen to full albums.
I believe they have some monetization plan involving allowing higher bitrate playback, but I don't think I can really tell the difference.
I did try migrating to Youtube Music first and gave up after one too many annoyances.
I'm looking as well. I came across asti.ga, which looks promising as it can use a variety of cloud backends, but haven't got around to using it yet. I'm actually also considering a plex setup.
And FWIW, the migration doesn't work. The "thumbs up" playlist goes into YT Music "Liked music" which includes all sorts of other YouTube "music-ish" videos that we have liked over the years and the order is all jacked up, plus mixed with all that other stuff.
So your "Liked Music" is now, not what you intended. The migration was super botched by the product team because of this.
I have videos of recipes and comic shows in my Liked Music. You would think youtube Google had better AI to detect this kind of stuff. Makes think many of the videos being wrongly censored/demonetized on youtube may really be because of faulty AI detection of the content. I do enjoy the fact that I can get all those live video music available on Youtube and not on any other platform.
I'm curious to know what you think should happen to those. They are songs after all, and some people liked them because they actually do like them as songs, so how would Google determine what reason you liked them for?
Are you suggesting Google shouldn't bring likes for certain songs over to YT music because you liked them 'as memes' rather than as music?
Just let the Google Music import create a separate playlist called "Google Music Favourites". that took me 2 seconds of thinking, surely the overpaid 'talent' at Google can come up with a better idea that their current 'fix'?
I don't want the option to completely separate my YTM likes from Youtube likes. I would much rather have to re-like a song again on YTM than have random videos show up on YTM. I don't want any of my Youtube content to be transfered.
If you think of it, before when I was on GPM, I didn't have any of my Youtube content and I was perfectly fine. So I'm not sure why I need any of it now.
Yes, good point. But I don't see mixing recipes video in your music as something optimized for revenue as I don't see any ads but maybe it pumps the views of these recipes or something.
I dunno, I believe Microsoft's Azure Notebooks predates Colab and perhaps gave Google the kick to make it public, and Colab was a spinout of an internal tool with a rather rocky relationship with open source that has still been a pain point I run into using it for teaching ("what is the difference between Colab and Jupyter?" is a question without an especially clear answer). Also they stole the name from GE's old internal social network.
That latter one, at least, was not entirely serious criticism.
I'm not sure that even Colab is an unmitigated win for the company, it does definitely have "that AWS feeling" of an internal tool that was made a product without really retooling it for that purpose thoroughly. This has kind of become the norm in cloud platforms, though.
Google Colab has a very very strong Engineering team. Part of Google Research they definetly changed the game when they offer a free product which 1) increased collaboration across ML research 2) offer everybody access to GPUs first K80 and now T4 which is great among researchers and students. Now many other notebooks products now want to be the Enterprise colab version
Very good question. They target different audience,
Google has many notebooks solutions: colab (free) colab enterprise (monthly) kaggle, ai platform notebooks and datalab. Colab is targeted to students/researchers which are just experimenting, as there is no guarantee that kernel will run more than 24hrs. The paid version removes this restriction. AI notebooks is targeted for enterprise data scientists (Jupyterlab) which require patches/VPC-SC/IAM integration, security, etc. Datalab is the very first version of the notebooks and that's going away. Kaggle is mainly for competitions. In the end Google will have only 2 Notebooks colab and AIP notebooks
GPM was my first streaming music service. I subscribed when it was still $7.99. It didn’t get too many updates, but it worked fine for years. Then they started pushing me to YT Music, which IMO is garbage.
I’m happy I realized where they were headed and switched to Apple Music awhile back.
> I honestly don't know why Google's Product Team has any positive reputation at this point.
They have a positive reputation?
I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains...
I'm about done. It seems like every month they do something to make it more apparent that they're just an advertising company. Products fail to get maintained, they get upgrades that make them less useful, or they're outright cancelled.
I'm planning on de-Googling a bit soon. I may stick with Android, although iPhones or FOSS options are tempting. I feel like I can't stomach supporting Google when they continue to make misstep after misstep.
I'm in a similar boat. I'm not planning on getting the new Pixel though (the Pixel 5 is badly conceived), and too many bad experiences with Samsung mean I'm considering moving to iPhone.
The lock-in with Photos they've slowly moved in is phenomenal. The exporting of originals is always somehow difficult due to random bugs. Lately I've had to resort to Takeout with some relatives to migrate them to Dropbox where they're not locked in, and about 20% of the photos don't contain any exported metadata. It's ridiculous since Google Photos shows those same pictures clearly on the timeline, indicating it does know when they were take, it just excludes that information from the Takeout.
Photos continues changing interface every few months, every time without any clear reason or logic. The underlying product is solid, but photos(and other Google products) definitely feel like they have some very expensive designers who continuously have to justify their own existence by changing the interface over and over and over again, without any reason to keep changing it other than securing their own jobs.
For me it seems more or less (mostly less?) than iPhoto though I'm not really an iPhoto user.
What I find frustrating is I'd like to name people (as in face recognition) but the UI for doing so is horrible. Instead of being optimized to let me tag 50 to 100 people it's design to do one person at a time in a tedious way where you pick one face from the list of faces which takes to another screen where you edit the name, then going to back to the list you've lost your place.
Further, there is no way to sort or set a priority on people so for example 8 of the top 20 people it shows are people I haven't interacted with in 10 to 15 years. I'd much rather it show people who are part of my life. Further, one of those 8 is an x. I have no ill will toward them but I don't really want them at the top of the list. And, there's no rhyme or reason who's on that top list. it's not a list by number of photos or most recent or anything that I can figure out.
Why is this important? Because if I can tag my photos I can search for photos of people. But since they make it hard to use it's like they don't want it to be used.
not OP, but for me the killer feature of photos is having a phone gallery that syncs with the cloud and is easy to browse in my phone and my pc. My phone breaking or being lost is way less of a worry now since I don't have to worry about backups, and I can take a picture and have it available in my pc instantly.
iPhoto is mostly the same but it's too tied to the os, which is a problem if I want to move to android for a while or need a photo in my work laptop that isn't tied to my apple account.
> I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains...
It was the same for me. But when Google seriously started botching the Nexus line and I bought three almost unusable products in a row (Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Nexus 5X), I was fed up and left.
Even if Google kills the Domains product, migrating to a different domain registrar is easy, and even Google wouldn’t kill the service off without offering a long time to migrate.
Regardless of price, I would never tie my domains to any Google account that has anything else in it. If it ever gets suspended by a rogue algorithm you might've just lost your domains unless you backed up your transfer keys and took a bunch of other precautions.
I'm having a very hard time deciding what my next phone will be. I'd like to move away from Android because it's basically an advertising machine, and iOS certainly seems to be the more privacy focused... But I also won't be able to run "real" firefox with an ad blocker like I can on Android...
Use PiHole on a Raspberry Pi or set your DNS to use servers that block ads via DNS.
I did the latter six months ago. One time I've had to show my college freshman how to change the DNS on her MacBook from the router default settings to Google or Cloudflare because the software her class was using wouldn't work otherwise.
We do have a Roku and I get tempted to set up 2 Raspberry Pis for PiHole. I did set up one, then had some issues because the router wants 2 DNS hosts. But it looks like a lot of time and switching DNS was so easy.
I have PiHole set up, and it's great. I do need to figure out a way to VPN to my pihole while I'm out and about.
I also am using cloudflared so my upstream provider is CIRA's excellent Canadian Shield DNS provider and all the clients in the house end up going over DNS-over-HTTPS.
If you upgrade your router to something like FreshTomato or DD-WRT, you have a lot more control over what DNS servers you advertise to clients on the network.
I had the same error with contacts on Google Contacts disappearing repeatedly when I changed phones and tried to re-sync. Contact information is so important in business that once you lose it you dump the product forever. Google Contacts immediately stopped being my Master Copy, though I use it as a convenience.
I really wish I could set my own permissions, it seemed like it had some multi-master bug.
To every Google employee reading this: your company sucks. Tell that to your manager.
With the exception of Youtube, I will never use Google entertainment products again. No Stadia, no Google Play Movies. I don't know what their vision is for product, but whatever it is subtracts from the world. I was worried a decade ago when I saw music moving into the cloud. Now my fears are confirmed. Google never intended to be a good custodian.
Google shits whatever goodwill it establishes right down the toilet. They do it at every turn.
Before Google's music subscription product, I bought a lot of music on the service. And now they're deleting it all. All of my playlists and listening history is disappearing. That's not a good feeling.
Screw you, Google.
After the DOJ takes your illegal money printing machine away, you won't have customers left to go chasing after.
The thing is: this isn’t even a fringe viewpoint. It’s pretty obvious that people are avoiding it at least in part because it’s from Google, and Google are never in it for the long haul.
They’re already getting proved right, as well, Stadia’s getting barely any updates or new games, no exclusives worth the candle. It’s really just a matter of time.
I am for now. There was the upfront controller investment as I already had the Chromecasts. For the most part I just play the free games on offer because of the fear of throwing money down a hole.
I lived through OnLive -- from beta to shutdown -- and that is exactly why I'm putting zero money into these cloud-only game licenses, unless it's a Netflix-style subscription. When the time comes for shutdown, they won't do the courtesy of granting one free license for that game on another platform, e.g.: Steam, Xbox Live, PSN. The purchases will just be gone and people will point at the ToS.
The only way IMO is GeForce Now-style services, where your existing digital library is honored. That or Netflix-style subscriptions like Game Pass Ultimate.
I realize we're talking about music and google here, but i'm curious how people feel about Audible and Kindle? I made a fairly large bet on Audble+Kindle because we ran out of space in our home for books (as well as the portability.) Our entire library is now on Kindle with elaborate notes -- how big a risk do you think this is?
(to compare risks, btw, in the past my past home got majorly flooded (Hurricane Sandy) and we also lost all our books+music cassettes in 1992 during the Nor'Easter...so it isnt like any option is w/o risks though of course there are levels of risk and levels of damage)
At least with Kindle books, you can run them through DeDRM and back up the DRM-free files. With Audible audiobooks, I’m not aware of a method other than to play them back and record the audio in real time.
Good point, though with the YouTube-dl DMCA takedown recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911), I wouldnt be surprised if DeDRM type utilities also get taken down soon.
OpenAudible works to remove the DRM on Audible books. Worst case, grab the CD versions from your library and rip them yourself.
It’s a shame about the notes on Kindle, I don’t think those are something you can back up / transfer. Really makes me wish that the open source alternatives had the same level of polish and feature set.
Kindle and even PC downloadable games fall into the same category. You stand to lose your license to access if the service shuts down but at least you have binaries or files that could be reversed. It’s becoming harder though, considering how much effort RDR2 took to crack.
I (mostly) only buy DRM free books,and I'm happily reading them on my ancient Sony reader which has neither a touchscreen nor wifi. Baen has a fantastic collection of DRM free content you can buy directly from them. All the Tor books are available from your favorite bookseller without DRM.
I use a Kindle, but always buy books from sources that also offer epub and PDF in addition to Kindle formats, unless the only digital alternative is on Amazon as some editors are very keen on Kindle DRM.
For my eyes e-ink devices are the best to read on, just like paper.
There’s a damn good chance that lots of people up the chain secretly think that too, but they don’t see any alternative to just putting one foot in front of the other.
Ok then that's much better than I expected it to be. Other services that act primarily as digital shops get a lot of praise overall( qobuz bandcamp) so I'm not sure about the situation here.
"I don't know what their vision is for product" Unless it pipes ads at you, after collecting as much telemetry as possible, they don't have one either.
So, everything works for me on youtube music, except the integration with Sonos lacks the "start radio" feature, which is 99% of what I use my Sonos for. If they don't gain this feature before shutting down GPM, then I'm going to cancel my YT sub.
And that's why we need to split these huge companies. Google just doesn't care if you and all commenters of this thread cancel their subscription. Their ads are doing quite well.
Smaller companies WILL care for their individual customers.
So, the migration doesn't work. it fails to see the musics I have on file in my phone. Also, I'm in a third world country (Burundi) where a lot of the musics are blocked for being played. I purchased an album in the old Google Play Music but the new Youtube Music doesn't allow me to see my purchased music without a VPN. This is really incompetence from Google.
I miss original Songza. Google, could you just let me have original Songza back? You killed it with your merge to Google Music, and now its only remnants are titles to some of the playlists you try to hide and never recommend.
Ugh. Unlike some others, my 'migration' worked, but YT Music sucks. Sorry to be blunt and short, but that's how I best describe it. It's in every way worse than GPM for my use. I legally buy songs, and just want to stream them. YT Music is obsessed with, after playing an upload, playing random music with ads in it, rather than say, playing the next upload. The only thing that works without much complaints is a playlist, so that's good I guess. I can't even figure out if/how I can purchase music from it, which is really annoying.
Apple Music comes with iTunes Match [1], which allows upload of up to 100k songs.
It's a little wonky for edits of songs that are already available in the Apple Music library — because it would try to deduplicate instead of upload — but it's still good enough for my use.
Google is out of the music purchase business, they no longer have licensing for that. That feature is fully gone.
Out of curiosity, are you a premium member or are you using YTM at free tier? I find the free tier version is much more handicapped compared to GPM, but arguably GPM was very generous comparative to the competition.
Free tier. I have zero interest in music 'discovery' which is essentially what people want money for. I just want to have a place to buy and stream my own music, anywhere.
I am a long time google music customer as well and having a hard time enjoying youtube music.
I'm kinda converting to other things with ads to find new music then I just buy the albums and host them on plex. Works like google music did, has android auto, sonos integrations, works from a browser, all the things. Except now I can keep everything in flac, stream on the LAN in lossless, and transcode to whatever while I'm away from home.
The most annoying part is I've had to start buying CDs again for obscure stuff that I can't find online in a lossless format. But they're easy enough to rip and throw in the music folder for plex.
I just removed my Google Home devices and migrated my music service to Tidal because of this whole YouTube Music debacle. Went like this:
1. Suddenly my Google Home would only use YouTube Music when playing to the Chromecast on my TV.
2. YouTube Music, among a bunch of other terrible UX issues around how it considers music to be organized/related, has the extremely annoying quality of always playing videos of the music instead of just the music.
3. Turns out there's an option in your account settings to tell it to only play audio, no videos.
4. Also, turns out this setting has zero effect when playing through a Chromecast, and thus the damnable videos persist.
5. So, I said, "Eff it!" and signed up for a Hi-Fi Tidal account (the audio quality improvement is immediately apparent, BTW) to replace my Google Play Music... er, YouTube Music instigated brewing household clusterf*ck (the chance was screwing with my wife & two little kids' ability to listen to music with the ease and predictability they had with Google Play Music).
6. I can cast Tidal to the Chromecast from my phone, so I figured I could link it in my Google Home device, and our household music situation would be basically back to normal. Nope...NOPE!
7. You can't set Tidal as a music service for your Google Home, which turned me into the family's sporadic impromptu disc jockey throughout the day, and entirely broke the kids' ability to manage their own music enjoyment.
8. Turns out Amazon's device ecosystem doesn't have this problem, so the Chromecast got replaced with a Fire TV stick and an Alexa pod.
In one felled swoop, via the most utterly existentially dubious product rollout and migration, Google managed to motivate me to eat the switching cost of replacing 100% of their hardware and 100% of their media services from my family's life. Truly a spectacular "own goal" on Google's behalf... and for what? What is even the point of YouTube Music?
I tried Deezer, Spotify, Amazon, and Tidal in one day. Tidal had the best mix of predictable intuitive behavior, easy to use UI, and as a bonus it seemed to have the best sound quality.
Though this may not be all that obvious in most setups, it just so happens that one of the persistent relics of a bygone era in my life, when I had more money than brains, is an underappreciated (I mean our TV is hooked to it and plays rounds and rounds of, "We are the Dinosaurs" children's classic), but almost-embarassingly high-end stereo system.
I use Plex to store my TV, Movies, and Music. One nice feature is that you can have your own music AND integrate Tidal to augment your music collection. It works pretty well.
Oh? No kidding? I think my TrueNAS machine has a way to setup Plex pretty easily. Maybe I'll give that a shot this weekend. That machine incidentally already has all my old lossless CD rips on it as an archive from before I uploaded them all to Google.
I really want to like Tidal but I can't support Tidal's endorsement of MQA[1] - an audiophile scam and an attempt to lock music into yet another proprietary format. While they still use it, I won't sign up and I'll continue to dissuade others from doing so.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] thread"We’re gradually going to shut down Google Play Music, the Music Store on Google Play and Music Manager soon, with everyone losing access in the months to come. You can read our full announcement here. This announcement follows the launch of our new migration process (back in May) which lets all Google Play Music listeners easily transfer their data and make the simple switch to YouTube Music"
Interestingly, no mention of the new requirement to pay $9.99 pm to listen to your own music in the background, or the fact that ads will play on previously purchased tracks without becoming a premium subscriber.
[android/europe, ymmv elsewhere maybe?]
No, its quite bad. In addition to being flat-out buggy (I've had it multiple times in the last week just decide to switch to a playlist it invented rather than the one it was directed to play), it doesn't support basic music playing functionality like song or playlist repeat, and (surprisingly) its Google Assistant integration is awful, forcing you to use casting from a different device for basic tasks with an Assistant-powered speaker.
That's...bizarre.
I'm on Android, and the repeat icon, which I know for a fact was not showing up in the app on my phone any time from when I was forced to use because Google Play Music stopped working on my home speakers through last night, is now showing up. (And, while there is an new update to the app, I haven't installed it yet, so its not an app update.)
> I'm also wondering about the casting, since I regularly cast (again from the Android app) to my minis at home.
Casting works fine from the app (well, playlist bugs excluded), the problem is having to cast from the app for lots of simple tasks where voice commands worked for GPM. As music is part of the bedtime routine for my toddler and preschooler, having everything suddenly be much less straightforward has been...unpleasant.
Bad UI + incredibly simple, stupid things like that drive me crazy. Google Music wasn't great, but it was far better tha YouTube Music.
As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products. It’s a major turn off.
So there's iTunes (2001-2019, but arguably renamed to Apple Music, so not actually dead), and Ping (2010-2012), the latter of which had approximately three users.
Like for like, Google Play Music (2011-2020) isn't quite as long-lasting, but more to the point, I'm not sure Apple has simultaneously maintained two competing services before ultimately canceling one.
Then the GP commenter mentioned "chat services," which makes the position unassailable. Google seems to have launched and folder a dozen or two chat services over time[1].
0 https://support.apple.com/guide/facetime/welcome/mac
1 no evidence cited
I can FaceTime with people halfway around the world with more clarity than I can talk to someone on the same WiFi network using WhatsApp.
Also, I was on a project with a colleague who had a poor internet connection and we found FT worked better than zoom. FT video quality seems to be the best of the services I’ve used but personally I don’t care about this part much.
I wouldn’t call these “killer features” but they are enough, with the integration into address book etc, to make it flourish.
Apple Music’s streaming service is a separate offering that has grown larger than iTunes.
Google’s reputation is that they will have 2-3 services with the same functionality. Whereas there are pretty legitimate business reasons you want want to make a streaming business distinct from a legacy content purchasing business.
This is still an option. Likewise the playlists I created on the go on my iPod Nano in a 2008ish trip reliably got migrated from versions to versions up until now.
Agreed that it is annoying, but its interesting to look back at how we got here. Google Play Music (GPM) launched in 2011. To get music on here, I'm guessing that team had to sign contracts with the various publishers and record studios. The onboarding and licensing terms of those were likely entirely around this music streaming service.
Then you have Youtube. It's been a video hub for anything, and other those 9 years since GPM launched, it has become a place where lots of people listen to music (watching music videos or the like). You have companies like Vevo that publish music content there. I'd guess Youtube has different contracts with those companies that have evolved over time about how music can be played.
So over these past 9 years, 2 products that had little overlap, have started to overlap more and more. As youtube expanded, it started butting into GPM's world. That likely was odd for Google for contracts and licensing of that content. Youtube Music (YTM) likely allows them to do it all under one silo now. Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM.
> Play videos on your mobile device while using other apps or when your screen is off. Background play is available on YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids mobile apps (if these apps are available in your location).
They only allowed background play on Youtube with a subscription.
Friend of mine who isn't me still downloads MP3s on torrents and has no cloud subscriptions. I'm sure he's smug about this.
I definitely had friends that used Youtube as a poor-mans spotify and would just keep the videos playing in the background on their desktop.
> I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
If it's the way they did, it was one of the worst ways anyone could think of. It baffled me how so many smart minds can work at Google and take so many terrible decisions at the same time.
This was just one in several equally stupid decisions they did. They could have dominated the messaging market by now, but they threw out that chance several times.
Sometimes I think it might have been on purpose. Maybe they are afraid to dominate too many markets at the same time and avoid a anti trust lawsuit? Because otherwise it literally makes no sense. Either this or they need to feed their stupid hierarchical loop giving senseless promotions to whoever creates a new thing that nobody asked for by destroying another thing that people were starting to use and like.
Even if the motivation makes some sense, the user experience is worse and I have very little faith that Google will maintain YTM long enough that I should invest in using it. The way Google does things means that in five years it will probably be on its way out in favor of the next rebrand that will get some product manager a promotion. Spotify, meanwhile, is still kicking after 10 or so years with no signs of slowing down or forcing users into a completely different app. i’ll stick with that, personally.
I like Hydrogen Audio for theory and comparisons: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Li...
The entire point of a music player is to play music in the background.
It doesn't. It forces you to watch videos (if you're steaming to your home stereo or other casting enabled device) and prioritizes the video versions of everything, even if the video isn't officially from the artist and us just some random person's resubmission.
The user experience is almost impossibly terrible. It seems like the kind of curated experience one would concoct if they were trying to prank someone with an intentionally frustratingly hostile UX.
Oh, please, I worked at Google as well, and this is typical Google’s inability to have attention span and coherent leadership for anything longer than 6 months. One VP did one thing, then another one another, then it turned out that it’s stupid and inconsistent. As. with. any. other. non-core product! Basically Google’s top leadership doesn’t care enough to impose coherent strategy across different divisions, and thing like this happen all the time (Android/Chrome OS, Chat/GVC/Hangouts/Allo/Duo/RCS/Meet, Gmail/Inbox, Nest/Google Home, and so on).
I'm sorry, what? Are you saying that Google play music would only play music if in the foreground? That's flat out wrong.
What are you talking about? You could always do this with GPM.
It was YTM which added the requirement for a paid account to keep allowing this very same thing.
You have things completely backwards.
Google just did a slack competitor, but to click the screen share button (very common in slack to want to talk and screen share to collab) you are forced over in to meet land, which forces you out of your chat and defaults to video (not wanted). It's just such a total mess its totally incredible.
Google still does worse but renaming things is pretty common.
Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
That's actually an interesting point that I've never considered before, even though I was aware of it.
iTunes has always been kept separate from Apple Music, with no evident plans to merge those in sight, while Google Play Music was used for both streaming and purchasing music. I don't think it ultimately affected the demise of GPM, but it is still an interesting topic to ponder.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210200
But as that article briefly mentions, the iTunes Store continues to exist and can be reached from the Apple Music app. I suspect this will change in a future macOS release, though I don't work for Apple and have no inside info.
Feels like Google has renamed a few things to be too close to Apple's.
Google Wallet became Google Pay. Picasa became Google Photos. also they have Google Drive. Google Messages...
Only recently. Before iMessage, Apple had iChat. iMessage used to interoperate, but no longer does.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza#History
It's not a rebrand. It's a rewrite. People need them promos.
In many cases, however, rewrites are actually warranted. As underlying infra gets replaced it becomes very expensive to run and maintain legacy services.
If you truly must change things, gradual piece by piece changes is far prefered than complete 100% replacements like GPM -> YTM.
If they had slowly migrated GPM behind the scene to use Youtube over the years, and then after 2-3 years, just changed the name, I'm sure users would've been far less alienated.
One day, do I expect to see an unveiling of a new Gmail UI? None of it is predictable because it feels like they do some serious a/b tests and just silently roll stuff out. They lack a structured presentation timeline. Currently users have no predictable expectations.
When that’s the case, just rename stuff, rebrand stuff, get rid of stuff, who the fuck cares. We didn’t promise the user updates, or even iterations, we simply promised them a one time product.
That’s the only thing that I can think of behind all of this. The simpler answer could just be their product team is not the best of the best for a company that works pretty hard at getting the best.
You are their product. They sell advertisers access to you. Everything else is a sideshow and they will eventually get bored with it and let it rot. Google has had a lot of good ideas over the years. They let devs create amazing things with the constant flow of ad dollars. But then those cool things don't make as much money as selling ads, and the devs want to move on to create a new thing, so the 300lb idiot baby that is Google wanders off and squats on something else.
I also have to wonder if Google is stuck in the doldrums of being a mid-life startup. Their initial team of rockstars have probably all retired to roll around in their millions. A whole new crop of money and status seeking folks have taken their place. Wall Street is expecting growth every quarter. There is constant pressure to refocus on revenue producers and grow the stock. They seem far detached from their initial roots under Sergey and Larry.
What is better to switch to right now, YouTube Music, or Spotify?
(for me, I'm sticking with YT Music over Spotify because you also get a YouTube Red subscription, and no ads on YouTube is worth it for me personally)
Youtube Music has only 256kbit AAC compression...that's a no go for me. I tried Tidal once, but the user interface was very slow, so I unsubscribed.
Also made the move as a result of the switchover and far happier for it.
I avoid Spotify because I'm leery of their podcast play, especially given their employee's protests over the Rogan contract. Just because Rogan's too valuable an asset to compromise, doesn't mean they won't go after smaller podcasters.
Apple by contrast has been a fairly responsible steward of the podcasting ecosystem with its publicly available index, and hasn't attempted to exert undue control over individual podcasts beyond delisting them from their search engine.
I don't have any trouble listening to my collection when internet gets spotty, I can have real full shuffle on my collection without hearing always the same titles coming again and again, and I'm guaranteed I own my music, with no-one able to take it from me. It feels like the future :)
That being said, I've been surprised how common it is to find albums on Bandcamp or bands' own sites. It may be the music I listen to (I try to never limit me to a few "genres", but I very commonly listen to music with small audience). I guess fees asked by platforms have something to do with it too.
YouTube music is OK, but worse in a bunch of respects. It separates out your uploaded music into a separate library (admittedly the matching in Play Music was always a bit wonky, but better than just giving up on the problem) which makes finding and managing music much more annoying. The UI is also really, really slow. Tt loads a single page of albums / songs / whatever at a time and takes a second to load the next one.
This can turn the process of scrolling through your albums, which has been effortless since iTunes debuted, into a multi-minute process. I've been hoping ever since they announced the switch that they would improve this stuff but it doesn't look like they've made any progress.
I understand why the switch to the new service was needed, from a license/business perspective. But no idea why they can't just listen to their users and at least match feature-wise the product it's supposed to replace. I've lost faith in Google's ability to produce software and not just endlessly rebrand things.
This is what it means to be a company with no vision.
YouTube Music has the one feature I care about: A catalogue that includes everything from well-known music from top artists, to the random indie music that got a grand total of 10,000 views on YouTube when it was published 8 years ago.
Sure I could download these songs (assuming RIAA takes its teeth out of youtube-dl) and upload them to most music players, but YouTube Music facilitates discovery and does all the work for me.
Not that I don't get why people complain about the move (it is a dramatically different app), but Google is the only one with the actual usage numbers, and honestly I've never met someone who has used it. I'm guessing they weren't the best, while Youtube has some of the best usage numbers of any Western service.
You know, that doesn’t really work, because ketchup lasts for ages
https://youtu.be/3LYwrvSFrms?t=116
(Wouldn't it be funny if this link caused a DMCA)
I absolutely detest YouTube music. It's only redeeming feature is a halfway decent radio and it's library ripped from YouTube proper. Everything else about is a worse user experience by almost every metric.
If there was a way to say "no, this isn't music", this would be easily solved. But Google's fascination with "AI-only" solutions won't let that happen. (You'd think someone would be happy to have an extra source of training data!)
This is so unforgivable. A playlist can be what? A hundred songs? A thousand? Ten thousand? This is a few kilobytes of data at most. Something has gone seriously wrong if the Google infrastructure and a mobile device with > 1gb of RAM cannot manipulate this small amount of data properly.
I mean, your point still stands, but it's more effectively made without the exaggeration I think.
I wish I could upload my music to spotify and redownload it again at will but otherwise its even offering the same decent suggestions, just went back to using adblock on youtube videos without a problem.
https://support.spotify.com/us/article/listen-to-local-files...
This support article is back from early August, and the announcement was on HN back when it was news.
Just curious why this is being posted today.
The big advantage is being able to play music from videos, which opens up a much larger catalogue.
Anybody have a recommendation for an mp3 player app that works mostly the same?
Although I've recently moved my library in to Plex, which handles sync between devices (you can set the app to copy some/all files to your phone storage). In addition to the Plex app, they also have Plexamp for a music-focused UX.
It's very nice if you're willing to put in a little setup effort. And since you run the server, you know it will never be shut down on you.
https://github.com/vanilla-music/vanilla
Or get them ported to YTM, but as far as I can tell, that's equivalent to downloading and then uploading the files there.
Youtube music is shit.
The client has an option that claims to do some normalization that I hoped would prevent large deltas in volume between tracks - in practice this seems worse than what I got from the GPM player. I mostly listen to long heterogenous playlists on shuffle, so this probably wouldn't matter to people who listen to full albums.
I believe they have some monetization plan involving allowing higher bitrate playback, but I don't think I can really tell the difference.
I did try migrating to Youtube Music first and gave up after one too many annoyances.
Youtube Music fixes ONE problem I had with GPM - proper gapless playback.
Everything else from the UX to the behaviour is worse.
Very disappointing because I'm on Android and I like Spotify even less, and I've always loved the Google "Radio stations" more than any other.
Feels bad man. Even when you give Google money they still pull the rug out from underneath you.
I listen to a lot of mixes, so this is untenable.
So your "Liked Music" is now, not what you intended. The migration was super botched by the product team because of this.
Mixing in the videos is ridiculous. Just because a video contains music doesn't mean it's part of my listening.
Are you suggesting Google shouldn't bring likes for certain songs over to YT music because you liked them 'as memes' rather than as music?
If you think of it, before when I was on GPM, I didn't have any of my Youtube content and I was perfectly fine. So I'm not sure why I need any of it now.
I honestly don't know why Google's Product Team has any positive reputation at this point.
I can count on one hand the number of positive launches from that company that didn't involve buying another company or product.
It's almost as if they're so good at playing politics and "the game" that people can't see the actual track record is shit.
That latter one, at least, was not entirely serious criticism.
I'm not sure that even Colab is an unmitigated win for the company, it does definitely have "that AWS feeling" of an internal tool that was made a product without really retooling it for that purpose thoroughly. This has kind of become the norm in cloud platforms, though.
I’m happy I realized where they were headed and switched to Apple Music awhile back.
They have a positive reputation?
I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains...
I'm about done. It seems like every month they do something to make it more apparent that they're just an advertising company. Products fail to get maintained, they get upgrades that make them less useful, or they're outright cancelled.
I'm planning on de-Googling a bit soon. I may stick with Android, although iPhones or FOSS options are tempting. I feel like I can't stomach supporting Google when they continue to make misstep after misstep.
https://support.google.com/policies/contact/sar
For me it seems more or less (mostly less?) than iPhoto though I'm not really an iPhoto user.
What I find frustrating is I'd like to name people (as in face recognition) but the UI for doing so is horrible. Instead of being optimized to let me tag 50 to 100 people it's design to do one person at a time in a tedious way where you pick one face from the list of faces which takes to another screen where you edit the name, then going to back to the list you've lost your place.
Further, there is no way to sort or set a priority on people so for example 8 of the top 20 people it shows are people I haven't interacted with in 10 to 15 years. I'd much rather it show people who are part of my life. Further, one of those 8 is an x. I have no ill will toward them but I don't really want them at the top of the list. And, there's no rhyme or reason who's on that top list. it's not a list by number of photos or most recent or anything that I can figure out.
Why is this important? Because if I can tag my photos I can search for photos of people. But since they make it hard to use it's like they don't want it to be used.
iPhoto is mostly the same but it's too tied to the os, which is a problem if I want to move to android for a while or need a photo in my work laptop that isn't tied to my apple account.
It was the same for me. But when Google seriously started botching the Nexus line and I bought three almost unusable products in a row (Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Nexus 5X), I was fed up and left.
PS. Cloudflare Registrar might be even cheaper, at $8.03 for a .com domain: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/.
I did the latter six months ago. One time I've had to show my college freshman how to change the DNS on her MacBook from the router default settings to Google or Cloudflare because the software her class was using wouldn't work otherwise.
We do have a Roku and I get tempted to set up 2 Raspberry Pis for PiHole. I did set up one, then had some issues because the router wants 2 DNS hosts. But it looks like a lot of time and switching DNS was so easy.
I also am using cloudflared so my upstream provider is CIRA's excellent Canadian Shield DNS provider and all the clients in the house end up going over DNS-over-HTTPS.
If you upgrade your router to something like FreshTomato or DD-WRT, you have a lot more control over what DNS servers you advertise to clients on the network.
I really wish I could set my own permissions, it seemed like it had some multi-master bug.
It's hardly a ringing endorsement for Google when the best I can say is "Well at least I'm not completely screwed".
To every Google employee reading this: your company sucks. Tell that to your manager.
With the exception of Youtube, I will never use Google entertainment products again. No Stadia, no Google Play Movies. I don't know what their vision is for product, but whatever it is subtracts from the world. I was worried a decade ago when I saw music moving into the cloud. Now my fears are confirmed. Google never intended to be a good custodian.
Google shits whatever goodwill it establishes right down the toilet. They do it at every turn.
Before Google's music subscription product, I bought a lot of music on the service. And now they're deleting it all. All of my playlists and listening history is disappearing. That's not a good feeling.
Screw you, Google.
After the DOJ takes your illegal money printing machine away, you won't have customers left to go chasing after.
They’re already getting proved right, as well, Stadia’s getting barely any updates or new games, no exclusives worth the candle. It’s really just a matter of time.
It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of how soon and painful it’ll be.
I'm not even talking about technical barriers(latency) - but the fact that they have both monthly sub and you have to pay for titles.
The only way IMO is GeForce Now-style services, where your existing digital library is honored. That or Netflix-style subscriptions like Game Pass Ultimate.
(to compare risks, btw, in the past my past home got majorly flooded (Hurricane Sandy) and we also lost all our books+music cassettes in 1992 during the Nor'Easter...so it isnt like any option is w/o risks though of course there are levels of risk and levels of damage)
It’s a shame about the notes on Kindle, I don’t think those are something you can back up / transfer. Really makes me wish that the open source alternatives had the same level of polish and feature set.
For my eyes e-ink devices are the best to read on, just like paper.
Windows Phone was so much better experience on similar hardware, plus I really dislike how they deal with Java and C++ developers on the platform.
Apple devices I only use them via employer provided devices, as I love my graphical workstation laptop.
I bet with the whole ChromeOS vs Android vs Fuchsia, there will be some casualties eventually.
Having worked at a some megacorps, I can tell you this strategy is not going to give you personal success at that company.
In addition, the entire layout uses a single row, sized for mobile on my ultrawide monitor.
How Google makes such a bad product I don't know. I switched to them because Spotify kept breaking their interface. Now they do the same.
Smaller companies WILL care for their individual customers.
Example: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=RDCLAK5uy_lmCjwO3-5S...
I know Game of Thrones is super not relevant anymore, but THIS is the kind of stuff that made Songza so popular you bought them out.
You can't, unfortunately.
Since the announcement of GPM's demise I haven't found a single other platform that fills this niche.
It's a little wonky for edits of songs that are already available in the Apple Music library — because it would try to deduplicate instead of upload — but it's still good enough for my use.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146
https://music.apple.com
Out of curiosity, are you a premium member or are you using YTM at free tier? I find the free tier version is much more handicapped compared to GPM, but arguably GPM was very generous comparative to the competition.
I'm kinda converting to other things with ads to find new music then I just buy the albums and host them on plex. Works like google music did, has android auto, sonos integrations, works from a browser, all the things. Except now I can keep everything in flac, stream on the LAN in lossless, and transcode to whatever while I'm away from home.
The most annoying part is I've had to start buying CDs again for obscure stuff that I can't find online in a lossless format. But they're easy enough to rip and throw in the music folder for plex.
1. Suddenly my Google Home would only use YouTube Music when playing to the Chromecast on my TV.
2. YouTube Music, among a bunch of other terrible UX issues around how it considers music to be organized/related, has the extremely annoying quality of always playing videos of the music instead of just the music.
3. Turns out there's an option in your account settings to tell it to only play audio, no videos.
4. Also, turns out this setting has zero effect when playing through a Chromecast, and thus the damnable videos persist.
5. So, I said, "Eff it!" and signed up for a Hi-Fi Tidal account (the audio quality improvement is immediately apparent, BTW) to replace my Google Play Music... er, YouTube Music instigated brewing household clusterf*ck (the chance was screwing with my wife & two little kids' ability to listen to music with the ease and predictability they had with Google Play Music).
6. I can cast Tidal to the Chromecast from my phone, so I figured I could link it in my Google Home device, and our household music situation would be basically back to normal. Nope...NOPE!
7. You can't set Tidal as a music service for your Google Home, which turned me into the family's sporadic impromptu disc jockey throughout the day, and entirely broke the kids' ability to manage their own music enjoyment.
8. Turns out Amazon's device ecosystem doesn't have this problem, so the Chromecast got replaced with a Fire TV stick and an Alexa pod.
In one felled swoop, via the most utterly existentially dubious product rollout and migration, Google managed to motivate me to eat the switching cost of replacing 100% of their hardware and 100% of their media services from my family's life. Truly a spectacular "own goal" on Google's behalf... and for what? What is even the point of YouTube Music?
Though this may not be all that obvious in most setups, it just so happens that one of the persistent relics of a bygone era in my life, when I had more money than brains, is an underappreciated (I mean our TV is hooked to it and plays rounds and rounds of, "We are the Dinosaurs" children's classic), but almost-embarassingly high-end stereo system.
Thanks for the tip!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated#C...