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Comment by tommysavaria | Hacker News Reader

It seems to be that they are looking to phase out Play Music in favor of Youtube Music. If that is the case, then those « lifetime » subscriptions meant that if was good for the lifetime of the service, and that is coming to an end soon.

If they shutdown Play Music, it might look similar to the end of Google Reader in 2013. They might be looking to get people off the service until they announce it.

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That's not an "if" situation. They've been very public about migrating to the Youtube Music platform for a couple years now.

Why are these companies obsessed with unifying their brands and capabilities?

You can buy dozens of different shampoo brands (because you like the bottle of this or the smell of that) and in the end your money will end up flowing to the same company; but $deity forbid that I could get two same-but-different services from the same company if they can avoid it. I mean, I get the operational savings etc etc, but if they are both profitable, why go through the pain and suffering of killing one?

Then you turn to another niche (like IM) and it's the opposite attitude.

Google's commercial strategies are pretty nonsensical.

Which means they'll make their google home functionality even worse - right now if I set my default music provider to google play it doesn't try to serve me up videos on my audio only machine, but if I have to switch to YouTube music I'm going to have to keep specifying albums and songs instead of just asking for the artist.

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