* Used to subscribe to google play music, but grew confused by where they were headed and moved over to amazon music. Never tried stadia after the slow rollouts of games after it went live.
I still have other subscriptions too (spotify, hbo, etc). I dont see them as competing with each other.
Youtube music has all of the music ever posted on youtube which is nice because it means you can generally find almost anything there (even obscure stuff not on Spotify). Unfortunately this can also make it harder to find what you are looking for, youtube music is full of low quality user submitted covers/remixes of songs that I don't want to hear but sometimes it plays anyways. Sometimes youtube music will have versions of songs that were really meant to accompany a music video and not the standalone song itself which is annoying to say the least.
The app is also far less capable as a standalone music app. Never has any lyrics, this weird concept of switching between video and audio, hard to view all fo the work of a particular artist/group on one page, no continuity between mobile and desktop a la Spotify. The hand curated playlists are also updated less than the ones on Spotify. Interestingly the machine generated recommendations from Spotify have also always been much better than that of Youtube Music, which is strange given how good Youtubes video recommendation algorithm has gotten in recent years.
On top of all of this I have been using Spotify since 2013; I have a massive amount of music in my library there that I have no way of porting over to Youtube Music.
Now that you mentioned it I looked at youtube music again and it looks much better. I might want to try it out and cancel spotify (although I dont know if my wife would come away from spotify).
But for $10/month (which it was back then) I was totally fine paying for it.
It really depends how much non-streaming TV you watch. I dropped cable TV (and landline) a while back. They didn't have zero value but certainly not $120/month value. I'd like to get live TV every now and then, e.g. for the odd sports game. But all the services, including YouTube TV, are pretty expensive for occasional use. Less than from the cable company but way more than any other content service I subscribe to.
I find Sling to be the best value now. YouTube TV turned into cable.
I agree with your general point. The streaming bundles are pretty much the same as cable TV bundles. So you either subscribe to a la carte very selectively or do without. I'd probably pay $30/month for a full cable bundle but not $65.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en
Is this the replacement for google play music?
I’m still not sure why Google couldn’t just focus their energy on one music service which seemed to be doing fine, but as far I was concerned it was a nice extra that at one point had a couple of albums I was having difficulty tracking down anywhere else. Maybe it’s a smaller scale version of their messenger ADHD. That said, their messaging was terrible, excuse me, is terrible.
Google Play Music + Ad-free YouTube + YouTube Music with what is it? Six family members including the main account for $15/month was a pretty amazing deal. I launched YT Music a couple nights ago to play some music you can really only find on YouTube a couple nights ago and it prompted me to import the small amount of Google Play Music I had before they totally kill the service (or maybe they already have?).
See [0]:
> YouTube Music will replace Google Play Music by December 2020.
0: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-will-repl...
Oh come on. There’s nothing unique on Apple Music. Apple TV+ is a joke with absolutely zero content worth staying for. So effectively that’s $15 for a me-too music-service and nothing else of interest.
Google has YouTube music ... and ad-free YouTube where tons of new content is published every single day, from a global pool of creative, independent creators. For $12, that is, for less.
In this particular case, why on earth would I prefer Apple’s offering over Google’s?