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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

YouTube without YouTube Red is not worth the trouble.

The YouTube Red / Google Play Music decoupling has me worried for the future of the product. I'm both upset Google Play Music is going away and that it might risk YouTube Red.

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Honestly I wasn't aware that Google Play Music was still around until I got an email telling me it would discontinued. I've been using YouTube Music since I signed up for YouTube Premium a few years ago, and I've been pretty happy with it.

Play music’s iOS app was riddled with bugs. The YouTube music replacement has all of the same features as play music with none of the bugs. The only regression is that to upload my own music I have to upload it to YouTube rather than a (supposedly somewhat) private personal library.

I much prefer Google Play's UI & did not experience the "riddled with bugs" you speak of. Just because it has the same content does not mean it's the same App or offers the same UX, it going away does not make me happy. I've been with Google Play from the start and am more likely to switch now, if it weren't for ad-free YouTube I would have quit because of this.

The UI sucked and the app sucked. I’m glad google did something because the previous state of atrophy was unacceptable. It would have been nice if they simply maintained their services, but replacing them with equivalent ones is acceptable.

Here is a list of the tiny sliver of the total bugs that I had experienced and knew off the top of my head six months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184669

Used the Android version, but I agree Play had/has a much better interface.

I know it's my age talking, but there are some people that still prefer to listen to entire albums. Make it easy for our kind to find albums, and then don't default to play a mix of singles after.

Agreed. Been debating switching to Spotify. But not having ads on YouTube has been amazing.

YT Music is included in YouTube premium, you don't need to switch to spotify.

It seems to be the other way around for me. I could not buy Youtube Premium, unless I first signed up for Youtube Music.

YouTube music sucks. Now that google play music is canceled. I either continue paying for yt red and stick with the worse music platform. I switch to prime music. Or I ditch yt and google music all together and use Spotify.

I still don’t get why google deprecated me as a customer. Google’s churn is exhausting. Starting to want the “Microsoft” & “Apple” experience of it just works.

I still don’t get why google deprecated me as a customer. Google’s churn is exhausting.

I tend to attribute the product "churn" due to how promotions/raises are handled where releasing new products is heavily favored over maintaining existing ones.

> YouTube music sucks. Now that google play music is canceled. I either continue paying for yt red and stick with the worse music platform. I switch to prime music. Or I ditch yt and google music all together and use Spotify.

I was worried about this too, but have you tried it lately after doing an import of your Play Music data? I've been a subscriber to Play Music nearly since its inception and none of the functionality I cared about seems to be missing from YT Music in its current form. Indeed there are a couple of YT Music features I am using occasionally (the lyrics for example).

I think the impetus here is really just to unify all of their streaming content services under the YT brand, which if anything instills some confidence in me that they won't simply kill it off (Play Music was feeling like abandonware for a long time, being under the YT umbrella with an app under active development seems like an improvement).

That said, there are plenty of other ways to get the actual music files. I treat this service as a way to discover playlists and new artists only, and if there's something I want to retain access to I acquire my own copy to ensure I will not lose access to it in the future.

I did make the switch to Spotify (although I don't really watch much youtube, so youtube red wasn't a blocker for me). I haven't been super thrilled with Spotify's ability not to repeat the same songs okay the course of a few days when I listen to it throughout the day while working, but I'm slowly having success getting it to give me more variety. This might just be due to me having a smaller set of music that I'm interested in listening to (classic rock, progressive rock, and some blues) compared to their average user who might be willing to listen to anything popular from the past several decades of music, including new stuff as it comes out.

I tried YouTube music. But it’s so repetitive and playlists are just the same songs I’ve listened to recently.

I miss google play music and Spotify style discovery.

Curious how you found Spotify to compare to YouTube music. As google play music was deprecated.

The auto generated lists are repetitive, but you can find any music playlist anyone's ever made on YouTube and those aren't. So instead of looking for a song and hitting play, which will start an autogenerated list based on your youtube likes, look for a playlist that has that song and play that instead. Also the more likes you have the less repetitive it will eventually get, but it's still a bit repetitive for me and I've been using YT Music for over two years now or however long since it's come out.

Please choose Apple Music or Tidal - they pay musicians substantially more than Spotify pay [1]

[1]https://images.prismic.io/soundcharts%2F571ff05f-9320-4e26-9...

Surprised how much Amazon music pays artists.

Spotify has no option to pay more because the labels eat all their profits. Apple being able to eat that cost because of their other ventures is anti-competitive. Blame the record labels, not Spotify.

Neither of those are significant for paying musicians, even if they're better than Spotify. This is why things like Patreon and Bandcamp have become so significant: the streaming providers are essentially not able to pay content creators at all, so none of them constitute a business plan for anything but themselves.

'better for the artist than Spotify' is… not a high bar :)

I buy a lot of music from Bandcamp, but its definitely not a suitable service for the vast majority of people.

> Please choose Apple Music or Tidal - they pay musicians substantially more than Spotify

Funny how you say that when Tidal have been caught faking plays[1] of artists close to Tidal-management, giving more money to them and less to everyone else.

But what do you expect by a streaming-platform literally run by “gangster”-rappers?

[1] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tidal-fake-streams-cr...

I've used both Spotify and Pandora for a while, and generally found Pandora superior.

They're still investing heavily into YouTube Premium (no longer Red) now so I don't see them getting rid of it anytime soon.

It's also still too early in the google ADHD cycle to kill it. Probably just reaching mid life at this point.

Nah, YouTube Premium makes sense. It's basically TY without ads. Why would that be too hard to maintain?

You hit the nail on its head. Google usually discontinues products which have high maintenance cost so even if it turns out that YT Premium makes less money than people watching ads (and I highly doubt the average person watches more than $10 worth of ads in a month), they'll still keep it.

Not really, for example Reader had really low maintenance costs. In fact at some point it was maintained by some of its former developers in their 20% time with no official head count.

I think it is a side effect of what keeps google from turning into IBM. Ossification is a perennial problem for large corporations especially traditional growth companies. They make their few big things then iterate on them. The "ADHD" shown by google, while it is annoying to users to have a perfectly serviceable piece of software discontinued unceremoniously, probably keeps the internal structure from becoming rigid and failing to adapt. I think they are probably slightly too far over on the side of kill stuff and move on but I'm not a multibillion dollar company.

Having zero headcount is the death knell for a project about to be cancelled. It only had low maintenance costs because the team was disbanded, presumably because it wasn't worth paying to maintain.

The story behind reader is more complicated than that.

It’s Google. The level of investment isn’t correlated to the propensity for cancellation.

Remember the most expensive ever Google product? Plus?

Right...

Or do you mean glass?

What? I'm pretty sure Cloud, Geo, and Search have more total investment than Plus.

Pretty sure self-driving will be the biggest loss, theyll make money from it and have relevance but itll be way less than they put into it so early

Do you know how much money Google has ever invested in Waymo ever?

I tried to search for a number, but couldn't come up with much. Obviously, this number would be very important in judging whether self-driving will be a loss for them.

> Google had spent $1.1 billion on the project [1]

The wikipedia also mentions Waymo raising ~2B and ~3b rounds that IIRC Google participated in as well. I'm surprised its so low honestly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo

Thanks. I should have thought to check on Wikipedia!

If you are willing to wait and just judge by eventually realised revenue, Waymo might still turn out to be a loss. But if you judge by current valuations (which reflect informed investors best guess of future revenue streams), then even after a recent major decrease we still have 30 billions USD.

That looks pretty decent for an investment of 1.1B + ~3B total.

Google Play Music is being replaced with YouTube music, so it's not like Google is abandoning the product. It's more of a brand realignment.

Google Play Music is being transitioned to YouTube Music, I already got migrated, and I'm now using and is fine/comparable to Play Music, just reskinned. The only annoying thing is its tied directly to my YT account, so all my playlists show up in YT too, but any music I play/like in YT also effects what it considers my preferences and its led to some odd stuff popping up in the personalized mixes. It is kind of neat that I can listen to anything that's been posted as a video.

All that to say its not being decoupled, its being extra coupled. Your YouTube Red subscription comes part and parsel with YouTube Music since its the same thing.

Funny, every time I get an ad for YouTube Premium pop up at the bottom of my iOS client, the feature they tout is "videos keep playing in the background" which sounds like an anti-feature. I use "killing the YouTube App" as the most-convenient method of stopping YouTube videos because it's less work than dealing with the on-screen controls.

> I'm both upset Google Play Music is going away and that it might risk YouTube Red.

What do you mean? YouTube Premium (“Red” is a legacy name from waaay back) won’t go away. When Google Play Music dies, YouTube Premium will instead pay for YouTube Music (the new, “equivalent” service) which will still be around.

Or am I missing something super obvious?

Isn’t it Youtube Premium now? For some weird reason Google sadly won’t let you buy ad free YouTube, unless you also have Youtube Music. I’m sure there’s a point to decision, but I don’t thing it has a basis in consumer demand.

I quite like the model - either you pay for Youtube or you don't. If you do, you get a bunch of stuff, some of which you might not use; but the total is still cheap, so who cares. I'd hate it if all-you-can-eat restaurants would make you decide up front if you want access to the desert buffet, too.

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