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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic! Maybe the outrage here resulted in something good?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746001

Also: I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music as a matter of principle after that drama. I hate the Youtube Music web UI so much, already.

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> I hate the Youtube Music web UI so much, already.

It's such a shame Grooveshark went under - they really nailed the UI. The only reason Spotify isn't too bad is because everyone knows it now, but back when it was relatively new, far too often people obliterated my entire queue just because they wanted to add a single song.

Man, I haven't thought about Grooveshark in years. It was so good, but doomed from the beginning. They didn't have any sort of copyright agreements in place and they let users browse any songs uploaded by other users.

Another blast from the past: Lala. Before Apple bought them, you could buy the rights to stream any song from their website for 10 cents. This was during the era of dollar downloads, so you essentially got a steep discount in exchange for needing to use a non-mobile device. I loved that service.

And Lala let you match all your own music library and stream for free, just like the marquee feature of Google Play Music, but years ahead of time. Also they let you stream every song (that you didn’t already have) once for free, and then you only needed to pay for it after that.

Lala was amazing, and I was bitter with Apple for years when they killed it.

And the three tabs that are different but actually the same is intuitive at this point but I couldn’t explain how it works to anyone who doesn’t already know.

Double tab to reset a tab to its home screen is something I don’t think you discover except by accident.

I switched to Tidal for similar reasons and it has been really painful. Unfortunately the competition is so bad that Spotify can do really, really bad things before it outweighs their overall competence at service delivery.

I don’t understand how it got to this point; Tidal seems like the most viable option but I swear even back in 2008 the field had far more solid options (e.g. Zune, as much as it was a commercial failure, was really great to use IME).

I just don’t understand how other streaming services haven’t delivered something like Spotify Connect yet. It has been available and basically the standard for streaming since 2014 at least.

> Unfortunately the competition is so bad

Somehow Google had a really nice solution, but decided to kill it and replace with the broken YouTube music app. Given how few real competitors there were, I'm really confused by that one.

Please let me disagree. Google Music has a terrible UI (as Spotify). Their only great feature is the ability to upload your own music. I'm moving to Spotify just because my friends create playlists there and they can share with me. Also the music discovery algorithms in Spotify are way better.

My great pain is that I had terrible results with the softwares that I tried to use to move my playlists.

Google Music (Android) has been one of my favorite UX on the platform, ever. It is dirt simple and exposes their award-winning machine-learning powered search in useful ways.

Spotify's looks attractive but daily use makes me miss Google's app. Spotify's web player loses pretty hard to Google's for me, as well.

That said, I just can't stomach YT Music. I don't know what they were thinking. The new value proposition for Premium is ad-free YouTube, which I might just keep buying because I'm addicted to celebrity math professors, astronomy, and a few crafting/DIY channels these days. But I'm struggling to like a music service anymore.

Sure GM has some nice features that I miss, but countless times I've clicked in the back button and left the app. I really hate it.

> I'm really confused by that one.

Google is a specialist in killing good products. They owned the news reader space and could probably have datamined it but killed Reader.

Edit: Removed a joke I made to avoid causing offense.

They do kill projects, but these are not really comparable. People paid directly for Google music. They also did not really kill it, but rather replace with an inferior version aiming at the same business. This is not even comparable to the chat/hangouts/meet migration.

I can find a reason, even if I don't agree with it, for most of their killed projects. This one is just... different.

I am sorry, I was trying to make a lighthearted joke but it must not have come across this way. I have removed the joke.

> People paid directly for Google music

In the case of many people they were paying for Youtube Premium and got Google Music for free.

> In the case of many people they were paying for Youtube Premium and got Google Music for free.

In the case of many people, it worked the other way around.

Something really tickles me about a single individual standing up to a corporation and strongly and clearly stating that the company is violating the law of their country and they won't hesitate to prosecute in a civil court for their rights. I believe that is what true justice against corporate overreach should be like. Ordinary people standing up for themselves.

I much prefer the idea that we might vote for and fully fund a full time civil servant to protect us mere peons from corporate abuse. Often the abusive behavior is conducted out of sight or against a naive group of victims. Building up the capability in societies so individuals aren't victimized by their naivette is a net benefit.

> I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music

I have also suspended Premium and went for Youtube Music. But Youtube Music is even more closed system. There is no API and Google isn't planing any. With Spotify API I am able to export and transfer my playlists and other stuff if Spotify liked it or not.

I found during my journey (Google Music -> Youtube Music autoconvert -> Spotify import) several online tools which could read a public Youtube Music Playlist (mine are 500+ songs, so not small, not gigantic) and one which allowed me to copy my "likes" over (read YTM like, find same Spotify song and Like it) so there are tools out there even though we don't have official or supported APIs. I could not find one single service to do it all, it took.. I think 3 different services to work through the process.

The largest problem I think happened is many of the origin tracks from Google Music were incorrectly named or identified; I had to repair the process in both YTM and Spotify to try and find the actual track which I had in GPM but with bad metadata around it. The mistakes were high enough that I thought to myself "wow, Google Music really had a lot of bad metadata" during the work.

> I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music as a matter of principle after that drama.

That's funny, since I did the opposite when Google forced me to switch from Google Music to Youtube Music. I have decided to avoid Google services when possible, since they invariably end up unsupported and later killed off and maybe replaced with a worse option.

I also want to stay away from services from companies that doesn't have that service as their main focus. Google clearly doesn't really care about music, but it's pretty much all Spotify cares about. Apple isn't really a music company, but unlike Google they care about a coherent user experience within their ecosystem. I won't buy from Apple for different reasons, but compare Apple Watch and WatchOS, Apple TV and Youtube TV, Apple Music and Youtube Music, and so on. Picking a Google consumer service is almost always a guarantee for worse quality and an uncertain future.

For the same reasons I wouldn't touch Google Stadia, there's other companies with clearer gaming focus and better track record of keeping services available.

Yeah, YouTube Music is a dumpster fire. Don't use it myself, but Deezer is supposedly pretty good.

How do I remove likes videos from my liked music. This annoys me the most after being force to switch from google music.

YT music is so bad. I switched from Play Music to Spotify a few months ago when they killed it cause I couldn't deal with YT.

Have you considered Apple Music? If not, how come?

It only works on Apple devices. I use an iPhone but also a Windows PC. It’s extremely simple to not consider Apple Music if you don’t have all Apple devices. I hate that ultimatum of “use ONLY our products or have a subpar experience.”

It works on Android with an app and Windows in the browser. That being said, the subpar experience part is definitely something I agree with, and come to think of it, if I used Windows I probably wouldn't use Apple Music either.

EDIT: I'm pretty sure iTunes for Windows has Apple Music support actually: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210384

I've been using AM on Windows for years and years now. I want to say it's been there since inception but I'm not sure.

Might’ve been, but I think I recall it took them a couple of months.

Anyway, another factor in the decision could be that aside from Tidal, Apple Music pays the most to the actual artists per stream. Almost twice what Spotify pays, I believe.

Apple music works great for me on Android, and their web player is pretty good (especially compared to the "native" Music.app on macOS).

You can access Apple Music through iTunes on Windows.

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