I bought a Google Home, and now I can't listen to music at work | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Google Home, and now I can't listen to music at work

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19 pointsrhythnic16 comments

I'm a little confused as to why this question from 2015 is on the front page of Hacker News. The answer (which may not have been available at the time) is "get a family account, which allows multiple simultaneous streams".

It does not (directly) allow multiple simultaneous streams. It allows multiple simultaneous users. This means setting up a dummy google account for each device that you wish to have play simultaneously, which is a bit of a pain.

Ideally it would be more Netflix-style, which puts a limit on the number of devices but does not really care about "identity", though obviously sharing the password to your Google account is a non-starter for family sharing cases.

> You can still only stream music from one device at a time on a single Google Id even with the Family Plan.

Is this no longer the case?

Ah, I didn't scroll that far down in the comments. AFAIK, yes, the family plan still only allows one stream per user. But in the situation outlined in the question you'd just use a different account on the Google Home than you do at work.

Exactly, just have ryanmercerhome@gmail ryanmercernotathome@gmail and use them accordingly.

reading through the thread though I get the impression that this is not necessarily the case.

Would be useful to follow the conventions on here and update the title with "(2015)"

The point that always bugs me when Google Music Family comes up for discussion is that being a G Suite user with one of the original free accounts means it's yet another service blocked for me. I get that I'm lucky to have the free account, but it is frustrating how many Google things aren't workable for those in this situation.

The Echo does this with Spotify too, fwiw. I ended up creating a separate account in my Spotify family for the Echo to link to Spotify, which is less than ideal as you lose your personal playlists, etc.

We actually canceled our shared Spotify account due to many similar friction points. The main benefit of Spotify was being able to discover new music, and I found it wasn't much better at that than subscribing to specific YouTube channels. The $10/month that I was paying to Spotify now goes towards about 10 DRM-free $1 songs per month, and considering how long I've been paying for Spotify, I think it's worth it. I imagine more of this $1 goes to the artist, too, compared to the royalties they'd probably have gotten from Spotify.

Same here. These services charge $5 more for a family plan, which lets you use five or six accounts. So you can make an extra account for your home devices, and then you have extra memberships you can give away for free to your family/friends. It’s not a great user experience but works well as a solution.

The HN title is very different from the real problem that the person had (using 1 account by multiple people at the same time, which of course is not allowed if he didn't pay for it).

The person who started that topic did have that problem, but I feel the title represents the topic as a whole, including all the comments. The problem is this. We have a Google Music family plan that includes my wife and I. We have a Google Home associated with my account. By invitation, I've added my wife to our Google Home group. We have both done voice match for the Home, but if I'm listening to music at work, and my wife asks Google Home to play music, it cuts me off at work. We could associate the Home with my wife, and that would fix my problem by transferring it to my wife. If she were driving and listening to music, and I play music through Google Home, it will stop for her.

I see, thanks! Maybe a new blog entry with a link to the old topic would have been better to show that there's a real problem.

Yes that would have been better.

Amazon Alexa has the exact same problem. I am sure it has something to do with licensing agreements with the songwriters. The problem is all of the music on both Google and Amazon that I listen too has been ripped from CD and uploaded by me so I own it. Now you can no longer upload music to Amazon that you own. At least Google still allows you to upload your own music.

This is from 2015.

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