Google Play Music, Music Play Store and Music Manager are going away
support.google.com
support.google.com
I understand why the switch to the new service was needed, from a license/business perspective. But no idea why they can't just listen to their users and at least match feature-wise the product it's supposed to replace. I've lost faith in Google's ability to produce software and not just endlessly rebrand things.
This is what it means to be a company with no vision.
YouTube Music has the one feature I care about: A catalogue that includes everything from well-known music from top artists, to the random indie music that got a grand total of 10,000 views on YouTube when it was published 8 years ago.
Sure I could download these songs (assuming RIAA takes its teeth out of youtube-dl) and upload them to most music players, but YouTube Music facilitates discovery and does all the work for me.
Not that I don't get why people complain about the move (it is a dramatically different app), but Google is the only one with the actual usage numbers, and honestly I've never met someone who has used it. I'm guessing they weren't the best, while Youtube has some of the best usage numbers of any Western service.
You know, that doesn’t really work, because ketchup lasts for ages
https://youtu.be/3LYwrvSFrms?t=116
(Wouldn't it be funny if this link caused a DMCA)
I absolutely detest YouTube music. It's only redeeming feature is a halfway decent radio and it's library ripped from YouTube proper. Everything else about is a worse user experience by almost every metric.
If there was a way to say "no, this isn't music", this would be easily solved. But Google's fascination with "AI-only" solutions won't let that happen. (You'd think someone would be happy to have an extra source of training data!)
This is so unforgivable. A playlist can be what? A hundred songs? A thousand? Ten thousand? This is a few kilobytes of data at most. Something has gone seriously wrong if the Google infrastructure and a mobile device with > 1gb of RAM cannot manipulate this small amount of data properly.
I mean, your point still stands, but it's more effectively made without the exaggeration I think.
So your "Liked Music" is now, not what you intended. The migration was super botched by the product team because of this.
Mixing in the videos is ridiculous. Just because a video contains music doesn't mean it's part of my listening.
Are you suggesting Google shouldn't bring likes for certain songs over to YT music because you liked them 'as memes' rather than as music?
If you think of it, before when I was on GPM, I didn't have any of my Youtube content and I was perfectly fine. So I'm not sure why I need any of it now.
I honestly don't know why Google's Product Team has any positive reputation at this point.
I can count on one hand the number of positive launches from that company that didn't involve buying another company or product.
It's almost as if they're so good at playing politics and "the game" that people can't see the actual track record is shit.
That latter one, at least, was not entirely serious criticism.
I'm not sure that even Colab is an unmitigated win for the company, it does definitely have "that AWS feeling" of an internal tool that was made a product without really retooling it for that purpose thoroughly. This has kind of become the norm in cloud platforms, though.
I’m happy I realized where they were headed and switched to Apple Music awhile back.
They have a positive reputation?
I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains...
I'm about done. It seems like every month they do something to make it more apparent that they're just an advertising company. Products fail to get maintained, they get upgrades that make them less useful, or they're outright cancelled.
I'm planning on de-Googling a bit soon. I may stick with Android, although iPhones or FOSS options are tempting. I feel like I can't stomach supporting Google when they continue to make misstep after misstep.
For me it seems more or less (mostly less?) than iPhoto though I'm not really an iPhoto user.
What I find frustrating is I'd like to name people (as in face recognition) but the UI for doing so is horrible. Instead of being optimized to let me tag 50 to 100 people it's design to do one person at a time in a tedious way where you pick one face from the list of faces which takes to another screen where you edit the name, then going to back to the list you've lost your place.
Further, there is no way to sort or set a priority on people so for example 8 of the top 20 people it shows are people I haven't interacted with in 10 to 15 years. I'd much rather it show people who are part of my life. Further, one of those 8 is an x. I have no ill will toward them but I don't really want them at the top of the list. And, there's no rhyme or reason who's on that top list. it's not a list by number of photos or most recent or anything that I can figure out.
Why is this important? Because if I can tag my photos I can search for photos of people. But since they make it hard to use it's like they don't want it to be used.
iPhoto is mostly the same but it's too tied to the os, which is a problem if I want to move to android for a while or need a photo in my work laptop that isn't tied to my apple account.
It was the same for me. But when Google seriously started botching the Nexus line and I bought three almost unusable products in a row (Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Nexus 5X), I was fed up and left.
PS. Cloudflare Registrar might be even cheaper, at $8.03 for a .com domain: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/.
I did the latter six months ago. One time I've had to show my college freshman how to change the DNS on her MacBook from the router default settings to Google or Cloudflare because the software her class was using wouldn't work otherwise.
We do have a Roku and I get tempted to set up 2 Raspberry Pis for PiHole. I did set up one, then had some issues because the router wants 2 DNS hosts. But it looks like a lot of time and switching DNS was so easy.
I also am using cloudflared so my upstream provider is CIRA's excellent Canadian Shield DNS provider and all the clients in the house end up going over DNS-over-HTTPS.
If you upgrade your router to something like FreshTomato or DD-WRT, you have a lot more control over what DNS servers you advertise to clients on the network.
I really wish I could set my own permissions, it seemed like it had some multi-master bug.
It's hardly a ringing endorsement for Google when the best I can say is "Well at least I'm not completely screwed".
To every Google employee reading this: your company sucks. Tell that to your manager.
With the exception of Youtube, I will never use Google entertainment products again. No Stadia, no Google Play Movies. I don't know what their vision is for product, but whatever it is subtracts from the world. I was worried a decade ago when I saw music moving into the cloud. Now my fears are confirmed. Google never intended to be a good custodian.
Google shits whatever goodwill it establishes right down the toilet. They do it at every turn.
Before Google's music subscription product, I bought a lot of music on the service. And now they're deleting it all. All of my playlists and listening history is disappearing. That's not a good feeling.
Screw you, Google.
After the DOJ takes your illegal money printing machine away, you won't have customers left to go chasing after.
They’re already getting proved right, as well, Stadia’s getting barely any updates or new games, no exclusives worth the candle. It’s really just a matter of time.
It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of how soon and painful it’ll be.
I'm not even talking about technical barriers(latency) - but the fact that they have both monthly sub and you have to pay for titles.
The only way IMO is GeForce Now-style services, where your existing digital library is honored. That or Netflix-style subscriptions like Game Pass Ultimate.
(to compare risks, btw, in the past my past home got majorly flooded (Hurricane Sandy) and we also lost all our books+music cassettes in 1992 during the Nor'Easter...so it isnt like any option is w/o risks though of course there are levels of risk and levels of damage)
It’s a shame about the notes on Kindle, I don’t think those are something you can back up / transfer. Really makes me wish that the open source alternatives had the same level of polish and feature set.
For my eyes e-ink devices are the best to read on, just like paper.
Windows Phone was so much better experience on similar hardware, plus I really dislike how they deal with Java and C++ developers on the platform.
Apple devices I only use them via employer provided devices, as I love my graphical workstation laptop.
I bet with the whole ChromeOS vs Android vs Fuchsia, there will be some casualties eventually.
Having worked at a some megacorps, I can tell you this strategy is not going to give you personal success at that company.
In addition, the entire layout uses a single row, sized for mobile on my ultrawide monitor.
How Google makes such a bad product I don't know. I switched to them because Spotify kept breaking their interface. Now they do the same.
You can't, unfortunately.
Since the announcement of GPM's demise I haven't found a single other platform that fills this niche.
It's a little wonky for edits of songs that are already available in the Apple Music library — because it would try to deduplicate instead of upload — but it's still good enough for my use.
Out of curiosity, are you a premium member or are you using YTM at free tier? I find the free tier version is much more handicapped compared to GPM, but arguably GPM was very generous comparative to the competition.
I'm kinda converting to other things with ads to find new music then I just buy the albums and host them on plex. Works like google music did, has android auto, sonos integrations, works from a browser, all the things. Except now I can keep everything in flac, stream on the LAN in lossless, and transcode to whatever while I'm away from home.
The most annoying part is I've had to start buying CDs again for obscure stuff that I can't find online in a lossless format. But they're easy enough to rip and throw in the music folder for plex.
As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products. It’s a major turn off.
So there's iTunes (2001-2019, but arguably renamed to Apple Music, so not actually dead), and Ping (2010-2012), the latter of which had approximately three users.
Like for like, Google Play Music (2011-2020) isn't quite as long-lasting, but more to the point, I'm not sure Apple has simultaneously maintained two competing services before ultimately canceling one.
Then the GP commenter mentioned "chat services," which makes the position unassailable. Google seems to have launched and folder a dozen or two chat services over time[1].
0 https://support.apple.com/guide/facetime/welcome/mac
1 no evidence cited
I can FaceTime with people halfway around the world with more clarity than I can talk to someone on the same WiFi network using WhatsApp.
Also, I was on a project with a colleague who had a poor internet connection and we found FT worked better than zoom. FT video quality seems to be the best of the services I’ve used but personally I don’t care about this part much.
I wouldn’t call these “killer features” but they are enough, with the integration into address book etc, to make it flourish.
Apple Music’s streaming service is a separate offering that has grown larger than iTunes.
Google’s reputation is that they will have 2-3 services with the same functionality. Whereas there are pretty legitimate business reasons you want want to make a streaming business distinct from a legacy content purchasing business.
This is still an option. Likewise the playlists I created on the go on my iPod Nano in a 2008ish trip reliably got migrated from versions to versions up until now.
Agreed that it is annoying, but its interesting to look back at how we got here. Google Play Music (GPM) launched in 2011. To get music on here, I'm guessing that team had to sign contracts with the various publishers and record studios. The onboarding and licensing terms of those were likely entirely around this music streaming service.
Then you have Youtube. It's been a video hub for anything, and other those 9 years since GPM launched, it has become a place where lots of people listen to music (watching music videos or the like). You have companies like Vevo that publish music content there. I'd guess Youtube has different contracts with those companies that have evolved over time about how music can be played.
So over these past 9 years, 2 products that had little overlap, have started to overlap more and more. As youtube expanded, it started butting into GPM's world. That likely was odd for Google for contracts and licensing of that content. Youtube Music (YTM) likely allows them to do it all under one silo now. Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM.
> Play videos on your mobile device while using other apps or when your screen is off. Background play is available on YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids mobile apps (if these apps are available in your location).
They only allowed background play on Youtube with a subscription.
Friend of mine who isn't me still downloads MP3s on torrents and has no cloud subscriptions. I'm sure he's smug about this.
I definitely had friends that used Youtube as a poor-mans spotify and would just keep the videos playing in the background on their desktop.
> I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
If it's the way they did, it was one of the worst ways anyone could think of. It baffled me how so many smart minds can work at Google and take so many terrible decisions at the same time.
This was just one in several equally stupid decisions they did. They could have dominated the messaging market by now, but they threw out that chance several times.
Sometimes I think it might have been on purpose. Maybe they are afraid to dominate too many markets at the same time and avoid a anti trust lawsuit? Because otherwise it literally makes no sense. Either this or they need to feed their stupid hierarchical loop giving senseless promotions to whoever creates a new thing that nobody asked for by destroying another thing that people were starting to use and like.
Even if the motivation makes some sense, the user experience is worse and I have very little faith that Google will maintain YTM long enough that I should invest in using it. The way Google does things means that in five years it will probably be on its way out in favor of the next rebrand that will get some product manager a promotion. Spotify, meanwhile, is still kicking after 10 or so years with no signs of slowing down or forcing users into a completely different app. i’ll stick with that, personally.
I like Hydrogen Audio for theory and comparisons: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Li...
The entire point of a music player is to play music in the background.
It doesn't. It forces you to watch videos (if you're steaming to your home stereo or other casting enabled device) and prioritizes the video versions of everything, even if the video isn't officially from the artist and us just some random person's resubmission.
The user experience is almost impossibly terrible. It seems like the kind of curated experience one would concoct if they were trying to prank someone with an intentionally frustratingly hostile UX.
Oh, please, I worked at Google as well, and this is typical Google’s inability to have attention span and coherent leadership for anything longer than 6 months. One VP did one thing, then another one another, then it turned out that it’s stupid and inconsistent. As. with. any. other. non-core product! Basically Google’s top leadership doesn’t care enough to impose coherent strategy across different divisions, and thing like this happen all the time (Android/Chrome OS, Chat/GVC/Hangouts/Allo/Duo/RCS/Meet, Gmail/Inbox, Nest/Google Home, and so on).
I'm sorry, what? Are you saying that Google play music would only play music if in the foreground? That's flat out wrong.
What are you talking about? You could always do this with GPM.
It was YTM which added the requirement for a paid account to keep allowing this very same thing.
You have things completely backwards.
Google just did a slack competitor, but to click the screen share button (very common in slack to want to talk and screen share to collab) you are forced over in to meet land, which forces you out of your chat and defaults to video (not wanted). It's just such a total mess its totally incredible.
Google still does worse but renaming things is pretty common.
Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
That's actually an interesting point that I've never considered before, even though I was aware of it.
iTunes has always been kept separate from Apple Music, with no evident plans to merge those in sight, while Google Play Music was used for both streaming and purchasing music. I don't think it ultimately affected the demise of GPM, but it is still an interesting topic to ponder.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210200
But as that article briefly mentions, the iTunes Store continues to exist and can be reached from the Apple Music app. I suspect this will change in a future macOS release, though I don't work for Apple and have no inside info.
Feels like Google has renamed a few things to be too close to Apple's.
Google Wallet became Google Pay. Picasa became Google Photos. also they have Google Drive. Google Messages...
Only recently. Before iMessage, Apple had iChat. iMessage used to interoperate, but no longer does.
It's not a rebrand. It's a rewrite. People need them promos.
In many cases, however, rewrites are actually warranted. As underlying infra gets replaced it becomes very expensive to run and maintain legacy services.
If you truly must change things, gradual piece by piece changes is far prefered than complete 100% replacements like GPM -> YTM.
If they had slowly migrated GPM behind the scene to use Youtube over the years, and then after 2-3 years, just changed the name, I'm sure users would've been far less alienated.
One day, do I expect to see an unveiling of a new Gmail UI? None of it is predictable because it feels like they do some serious a/b tests and just silently roll stuff out. They lack a structured presentation timeline. Currently users have no predictable expectations.
When that’s the case, just rename stuff, rebrand stuff, get rid of stuff, who the fuck cares. We didn’t promise the user updates, or even iterations, we simply promised them a one time product.
That’s the only thing that I can think of behind all of this. The simpler answer could just be their product team is not the best of the best for a company that works pretty hard at getting the best.
You are their product. They sell advertisers access to you. Everything else is a sideshow and they will eventually get bored with it and let it rot. Google has had a lot of good ideas over the years. They let devs create amazing things with the constant flow of ad dollars. But then those cool things don't make as much money as selling ads, and the devs want to move on to create a new thing, so the 300lb idiot baby that is Google wanders off and squats on something else.
I also have to wonder if Google is stuck in the doldrums of being a mid-life startup. Their initial team of rockstars have probably all retired to roll around in their millions. A whole new crop of money and status seeking folks have taken their place. Wall Street is expecting growth every quarter. There is constant pressure to refocus on revenue producers and grow the stock. They seem far detached from their initial roots under Sergey and Larry.
I'm grateful for this thread because this move absolutely destroyed my last bit of good will towards Google. I'm incensed over it. The YT Music app is so much worse an experience, it is acutely evident users are not what Google has in mind with this app. Just embarrassingly bad, as has been noted by many others here.
For the users who stay using the undeniably worse app, Google will see more views for yt videos, upping their vanity metrics there. The addition of ads playing on music that I brought to the app in the base edition is awful, but good for the bottom line of the ads group.
Meanwhile, thanks to this horseshit, I am [finally] pulling my personal domain off of their G-suite, my next phone is going to be an iPhone [or a Librem], and I'm going to offer my services free to any of the clients I've put on to G-suite [several dozen over the years, regrettably] who want to egress somewhere safer.
Youtube is inescapable for video and I will likely always use it. But I'm going to stop paying for ad free and find other ways to get what I want from Google without giving them anything in return.
I'll also do everything in my power to try to make the ill will this has generated into a chorus.
I don't see how you're forced to use Youtube. I agree that using Youtube as your music library and management tool seems ridiculous. However why would anyone but casual listeners do so when there are plenty better alternatives? Just use one of the countless music players and library management tools much better suited to that task. Personally, I love Roon [1], but if you prefer something more affordable or free several other options come to mind:
- MusicBee
- Swinsian
- Foobar
or just plain old iTunes / Music.app
All of them are much better music players / collection organizers than Youtube.
I really have to wonder what morale is like in Google-land. So much of their corporate ethos was built on what great things they do for the world, and now with this constant drumbeat of basically everyone saying "we hate you, you suck, I can't wait until you get broken up" has to be weighing on employees.
And note this is not just a "people hate all big companies" thing. Sure, people have tons of gripes about Apple and Netflix for example but nowhere near the level of broken trust/expectations that has happened at Google.
Yeah, there's plenty of people liking Google and even Facebook still.
Please never never mix up the sentiment of a site with a voting system (which while design will drown out certain ideas) with the general reality. This leads into very nasty surprises - both when releasing products in your company or when expecting election results. To be honest it's very bizzare that supposedly smart people on HN say dumb things like "who's still using Google products" and other silly sentiment in this very thread.
(Having said that, YTM is a pretty awful product which seems to be born from some very awful corporate decisionmaking. Everything YouTube is really.)
When you are getting money the amounts Google pays their employees, you couldn't care less if everyone in the world says "we hate you, you suck"
Plus, once you have Google on your resume, it's hard to imagine a company that will reject you so ... again, no one cares if they are hated.
That kind of exquisitely proves my point. Back 15-20 years ago, the pitch was "if you're really smart and want to make gobs of money, but don't mind selling your soul, go to Wall Street. If you want to change the world (for the better) go to Silicon Valley."
Yes, of course that was always somewhat marketing speak, but it was also fairly representative of how people thought. This idea that people are just in it for the money, or just in it to "build your resume", are the kind of behaviors Googlers from an earlier era would have looked at with utter distain.
1. Suddenly my Google Home would only use YouTube Music when playing to the Chromecast on my TV.
2. YouTube Music, among a bunch of other terrible UX issues around how it considers music to be organized/related, has the extremely annoying quality of always playing videos of the music instead of just the music.
3. Turns out there's an option in your account settings to tell it to only play audio, no videos.
4. Also, turns out this setting has zero effect when playing through a Chromecast, and thus the damnable videos persist.
5. So, I said, "Eff it!" and signed up for a Hi-Fi Tidal account (the audio quality improvement is immediately apparent, BTW) to replace my Google Play Music... er, YouTube Music instigated brewing household clusterf*ck (the chance was screwing with my wife & two little kids' ability to listen to music with the ease and predictability they had with Google Play Music).
6. I can cast Tidal to the Chromecast from my phone, so I figured I could link it in my Google Home device, and our household music situation would be basically back to normal. Nope...NOPE!
7. You can't set Tidal as a music service for your Google Home, which turned me into the family's sporadic impromptu disc jockey throughout the day, and entirely broke the kids' ability to manage their own music enjoyment.
8. Turns out Amazon's device ecosystem doesn't have this problem, so the Chromecast got replaced with a Fire TV stick and an Alexa pod.
In one felled swoop, via the most utterly existentially dubious product rollout and migration, Google managed to motivate me to eat the switching cost of replacing 100% of their hardware and 100% of their media services from my family's life. Truly a spectacular "own goal" on Google's behalf... and for what? What is even the point of YouTube Music?
Though this may not be all that obvious in most setups, it just so happens that one of the persistent relics of a bygone era in my life, when I had more money than brains, is an underappreciated (I mean our TV is hooked to it and plays rounds and rounds of, "We are the Dinosaurs" children's classic), but almost-embarassingly high-end stereo system.
Thanks for the tip!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated#C...
"We’re gradually going to shut down Google Play Music, the Music Store on Google Play and Music Manager soon, with everyone losing access in the months to come. You can read our full announcement here. This announcement follows the launch of our new migration process (back in May) which lets all Google Play Music listeners easily transfer their data and make the simple switch to YouTube Music"
Interestingly, no mention of the new requirement to pay $9.99 pm to listen to your own music in the background, or the fact that ads will play on previously purchased tracks without becoming a premium subscriber.
[android/europe, ymmv elsewhere maybe?]
YouTube music is OK, but worse in a bunch of respects. It separates out your uploaded music into a separate library (admittedly the matching in Play Music was always a bit wonky, but better than just giving up on the problem) which makes finding and managing music much more annoying. The UI is also really, really slow. Tt loads a single page of albums / songs / whatever at a time and takes a second to load the next one.
This can turn the process of scrolling through your albums, which has been effortless since iTunes debuted, into a multi-minute process. I've been hoping ever since they announced the switch that they would improve this stuff but it doesn't look like they've made any progress.
Google Play is simple, clean with syncing that just works everywhere I need to access it with a simple checkmark to specify which playlists I want downloaded that worked well in offline mode. Now I'm being forced into using a new music web, mobile & car play apps which prioritizes music videos? I don't think so.
I don't know which bean counters are responsible for this decision but I can't imagine the cost of maintaining a skeleton crew to upkeep a frozen service would be more than the irreparable harm done to its millions of customers being forced to a use a service they don't want to, who'll be using it as an inflection point for deciding which Service they'd prefer to use instead.
I'll still be keeping the ad-free YouTube for the near future, but it went from being indispensable to being the next subscription on the chopping block if my time on YouTube wanes further. I'm already spending more of my time on Twitch, that if the move to Apple Music is well received by the family I'll be leaving Google Play entirely over this.
You can also bet my trust for investing in using new Google services is also shot at this point, I'd rather put my time and resources into a customer focused alternative than the disregard Google has shown its long time customers, time and again.
So I’ve stopped using it because as a user it no longer works.
Example: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=RDCLAK5uy_lmCjwO3-5S...
I know Game of Thrones is super not relevant anymore, but THIS is the kind of stuff that made Songza so popular you bought them out.
Why is it considered reasonable to rely on services and companies that we know we're going to outlive?
Music CDs will take up physical space and might be more expensive upfront (though I doubt they'll be so in the long run). However, the upsides are huge. One, you own the content forever - even if you switch countries or want to pass it along to your children. Two, you can rip higher quality audio (such as FLAC as opposed to max 320 kbps from streaming services). Three, you get a physical artifact of the music you love (artwork and all).
I can buy downloadable MP3s from Amazon, if I wanted to own the music.
Thing is, I don't. I want a streaming service that has all the music ever produced, that I can hook into the player of my choice, and one that works on my phone when I am driving, and at my computer at work when I am working and at my home computer when I am at home.
CDs wouldn't do any of that and they are a pain to rip and I don't want the music on different devices.
I can't hear the difference between a 256+ MP3 and neither can most people. I won't argue that nobody can, but most people who have thousands of dollars in audio equipment probably weren't streaming to begin with.
1. Music is a commodity, everything should be available everywhere all the time. I don't care about "owning" my music, I care about listening to music. 2. Quality is good enough on Spotify. I'm not even sure I can notice the difference between Spotify and a CD playing on the same system. And I don't want to spend time on ripping and tagging and sorting and storing music. 3. I have enough stuff.
Spoken as someone who spent an inordinate amount of time and money buying and ripping CD's back in the days. And downloading from torrent sites of course. My digital music collection was huge and in neat order. Threw it all away when Spotify came on the scene.
I'm thinking I'll buy some of the songs I had marked in Google Play Music. I'm not sure I'll buy all of them or even if I can.
Also I haven't owned a CD player that connects to a computer in 7 years. Even the gamer PC I just built 2 months ago I didn't put a drive in it.
You can do both; use Spotify / Youtube whatever to find new songs, and then buy your own copy if you find something you like.
> Also I haven't owned a CD player that connects to a computer in 7 years. Even the gamer PC I just built 2 months ago I didn't put a drive in it.
Personally I no longer buy CD’s, I buy files on Bandcamp etc., but with the exception of the artwork most of the advantages are the same. And the songs synchronise with your tablet, your phone and will always be there without internet connection. I have a Spotify enabled DJ-app, and that integration stopped working recently, which was inconvenient, but really not a big deal because I have the files for my core library.
> I'm thinking I'll buy some of the songs I had marked in Google Play Music. I'm not sure I'll buy all of them or even if I can.
That’s a great idea. It’s true that you won’t find everything. But in between Bandcamp (lossless and big cut to artists), Qobuz (lossless and more major labels) and the iTunes Store (high quality AAC, cheap) a lot more is available than before, and DRM free. A much better situation than with video, for example.
But YouTube Music is just a mess. I migrated my library to YTM and my experience is like the rest, but worse:
* You can't migrate to brand (aka alias) accounts. All of my likes, uploads, favorites, recommendation profile are on my alias but to listen to my music I have to switch to my real name account. Oh, but aliases can still use YT Music, so there's virtually no reason for this restriction.
* Switching accounts is for both YT and YT Music. So if I switch back to my alias on [normal] YT, the already-open YT Music tab will stop the music and ask me to switch back or refresh.
* All of my music poured into "Liked Videos". Except only about ~180 songs are there and I had over a thousand saved, if not thousands. No idea where the rest are.
* Some of the songs are "not available in your country" but if I search for it and find the official music video, that one is.
* This applied to GPM too, but: no desktop app. You can pretend the web app is a desktop app (and it's a little smoother than GPM at least) but it's still much more taxing than even a webview app like Spotify's.
[1] Fun fact: if you unsubscribe from GPM All-Access, your liked/saved songs that aren't uploaded disappear but are still in the DB, so you can't even see them. I don't know if they're part of Google Takeout, but when I moved to Spotify that meant I had to remember what songs I liked.
I am currently back to Google Music...! Sooo much better. I'm not sure what I will do after they shut it down for good. Probably resort back to last.fm for recommendation and hop to another streaming platform.
For comparison, iTunes Music store was launched in 2003. I still have access to songs I bought with my mom’s credit card when I was 15. I’m 32.
Which company respects users more?
Google Play Music has the best recommendation tech.
YT Music (and Spotify) have very poor recommendation tech.
Examples:
Spotify Playlist "Morning Pickup"
First song is someone depressed they know they should break up but can't yet do it. Second song is about someone longing for their ex while in their current relationship. Maybe I interpreted this wrong. I assumed "Morning Pickup" was supposed to be music played to "pick me up", make me ready for the day, in other words, happy or inspiring music. Instead it could have just meant music promoted this morning.
Spotify: Prince (Radio)
Spotify plays rap. AFAIK that's a racist suggestion. Prince had nothing to do with rap. The only connection is that he's African American.
Youtube Music: Song "Fuck you till your Groove" by Jill Jones (radio)
Youtube plays "Such a Shame" by Talk Talk and "All Night Long" by Lionel Richie as suggested followup songs!?! WTFBBQ!!
Youtube Music: Swingrowers (Radio) (this is a Swing or Electro-Swing group)
Youtube plays "Bliss on Mushrooms" by Infected Mushroom
Youtube Music: Prince (Radio)
Youtube plays "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" by Whitney Houston, "Inspector Horse" by Todd Terge, A bunch of Micheal Jackson, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" by Santa Esmeralda, "Heart of Glass" by Blondie. Those all of next to nothing to do with Prince.
Youtube Music: Depeche Mode (Radio)
Youtube plays "Call on Me" by Eric Prydz
I would pay a premium for a music service that isn't providing such incompetent recommendation engine.
Unfortunatly Apple Music is even worse at that. I have canceled after 30 days of heavy metal being pushed down my throat day after day - the only genre I do not listen to.
The big advantage is being able to play music from videos, which opens up a much larger catalogue.
No, its quite bad. In addition to being flat-out buggy (I've had it multiple times in the last week just decide to switch to a playlist it invented rather than the one it was directed to play), it doesn't support basic music playing functionality like song or playlist repeat, and (surprisingly) its Google Assistant integration is awful, forcing you to use casting from a different device for basic tasks with an Assistant-powered speaker.
That's...bizarre.
I'm on Android, and the repeat icon, which I know for a fact was not showing up in the app on my phone any time from when I was forced to use because Google Play Music stopped working on my home speakers through last night, is now showing up. (And, while there is an new update to the app, I haven't installed it yet, so its not an app update.)
> I'm also wondering about the casting, since I regularly cast (again from the Android app) to my minis at home.
Casting works fine from the app (well, playlist bugs excluded), the problem is having to cast from the app for lots of simple tasks where voice commands worked for GPM. As music is part of the bedtime routine for my toddler and preschooler, having everything suddenly be much less straightforward has been...unpleasant.
Bad UI + incredibly simple, stupid things like that drive me crazy. Google Music wasn't great, but it was far better tha YouTube Music.
What is better to switch to right now, YouTube Music, or Spotify?
(for me, I'm sticking with YT Music over Spotify because you also get a YouTube Red subscription, and no ads on YouTube is worth it for me personally)
Youtube Music has only 256kbit AAC compression...that's a no go for me. I tried Tidal once, but the user interface was very slow, so I unsubscribed.
Also made the move as a result of the switchover and far happier for it.
I avoid Spotify because I'm leery of their podcast play, especially given their employee's protests over the Rogan contract. Just because Rogan's too valuable an asset to compromise, doesn't mean they won't go after smaller podcasters.
Apple by contrast has been a fairly responsible steward of the podcasting ecosystem with its publicly available index, and hasn't attempted to exert undue control over individual podcasts beyond delisting them from their search engine.
I don't have any trouble listening to my collection when internet gets spotty, I can have real full shuffle on my collection without hearing always the same titles coming again and again, and I'm guaranteed I own my music, with no-one able to take it from me. It feels like the future :)
That being said, I've been surprised how common it is to find albums on Bandcamp or bands' own sites. It may be the music I listen to (I try to never limit me to a few "genres", but I very commonly listen to music with small audience). I guess fees asked by platforms have something to do with it too.
- clear queue - multi-select in queue - save queue as playlist - high resolution album covers - play count
It's great to consolidate overlapping products. But, why can't a company with 20,000 engineers bring YT music up to feature parity before killing off the better product?
Youtube music is shit.
At least there's a silver lining...
[1] "A list of the tracks, playlists, radio stations, uploads, and purchases in your Google Play Music library" Key to me was my playlists, including my "Thumbs Up" playlist, which as others have noted is polluted by "Liked" music videos on Youtube in the migration
Also, a huge "wtf" from me for:
>I do not want to pay for a streaming service and would like to buy individual songs & albums instead. How can I do this on YouTube Music?
>While you cannot purchase music from YouTube Music, you can do so from another store and upload that music into YouTube Music. This way, you can have your entire music library in one place. Note that you can play uploaded songs in the background, ad-free and offline with a free YouTube Music subscription.
Nice, I can upload my music to your service, and pay you to access music I paid for already? How's that expression go? "Smooth move, ex-lax."
This support article is back from early August, and the announcement was on HN back when it was news.
Just curious why this is being posted today.
I listen to very uncommon music that's not available anywhere to be streamed. Google Play Music was the only solution for streaming all my collection. I am looking for replacements... please let me know if you have any. My current bet is something like owncloud.
Youtube Music fixes ONE problem I had with GPM - proper gapless playback.
Everything else from the UX to the behaviour is worse.
Very disappointing because I'm on Android and I like Spotify even less, and I've always loved the Google "Radio stations" more than any other.
Feels bad man. Even when you give Google money they still pull the rug out from underneath you.
I listen to a lot of mixes, so this is untenable.
Anybody have a recommendation for an mp3 player app that works mostly the same?
Although I've recently moved my library in to Plex, which handles sync between devices (you can set the app to copy some/all files to your phone storage). In addition to the Plex app, they also have Plexamp for a music-focused UX.
It's very nice if you're willing to put in a little setup effort. And since you run the server, you know it will never be shut down on you.
Edit - boy looking forward to this experience. Open the app - CTA for a trial, close it, screen changes, same CTA comes up again. Oh just played a song and had an advert and another premium sign-up thing come up.
I was experimenting on having all my music on my nas and streaming directly from there instead of relying on another subscription service, so I think I will try to move everything to that (currently the only thing I lack is streaming directly to my tv, because i don't have that use case often).
A simple product with a clear identity. In many ways a finished product with no need of big changes or a replacement. A Spotify-killer really. It certainly killed my Spotify-account.
YouTube music is the exact opposite in every way. No clear identity, it’s main selling point is some vague benefit of having access to the “YouTube catalogue”. Whatever. And your uploaded music is deliberately siloed off in a separate section which doesn’t integrate at all with the normal playback, search and playlist-functionality. A complete joke.
Why oh why does Google think this is an improvement for ... anyone? It’s offensive, really.
I wish I could upload my music to spotify and redownload it again at will but otherwise its even offering the same decent suggestions, just went back to using adblock on youtube videos without a problem.
https://support.spotify.com/us/article/listen-to-local-files...
If you have linkedin premium, reach out to the person linked here, Gwen Shen and let her know how much google music sucks. https://old.reddit.com/r/googleplaymusic/comments/jbbw3m/any...
"Hey Google, play my music" on a Nest Hub in the kitchen so I can listen to something while cooking used to play music - now it often (but not always) insists on running whatever crazy video it found for my tunes.
I simply don't watch music videos. I have no interest in them. I don't like that they joined together my music and misc YouTube clicks together.
I'm now looking for an alternative. I just want what I had before. Listen to music and skip the videos so I can cook in peace.
If they didn't bundle YouTube Premium with the music subscription I would have ditched it and switched to Spotify. As it is, I'm considering getting a phone with enough storage and just switching back to mp3s. Google still doesn't understand what music lovers want(like not skipping to the next track abruptly if there is a momentary connection issue).
One of the issues I'm having is that there are far more songs from artists showing up on compilation albums ("Hits of the 90s!"), as well as crappy cover tunes. I want the original song from the original album, thanks. I've also had a couple mislabeled songs, like the other day a track by the Hollies was actually a Beatles tune when I played it. Not a cover, a different song altogether. What the hell?
You can of course get your ripped music from Google Takeout.
I wanted a headless install, and MiniDLNA works great - you just install with apt-get and then point it to a directory tree of mp3 files.
Hi-Fi Audio costs $9 -- I could not find an equivalent free & ad-free player, though they must exist.
dsub is a brilliant piece of software, and it uses the subsonic api
I don't care about online features. Folder, mp3, maybe a m3u/m3u8 file, play. Simple.
That was a stupid thought, of course. Everything's kinda temporary in the new economy. That said, Apple has been pretty damned stable on this area.
"Get Music Premium to listen ad-free, offline & with your screen off. You have YouTube Premium"
Are they two different things?
Smaller companies WILL care for their individual customers.
Does anyone have any recommendations for good offline music players?
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
Unfortunately, YT Music isn't really a drop-in replacement for the other.
Same reason Facebook is forcing login on Oculus
It's disgusting
I generally like to use Google software, but in the time it took them to reinvent their music player from the ground up while neglecting the previous version, I moved to Spotify.
Or get them ported to YTM, but as far as I can tell, that's equivalent to downloading and then uploading the files there.
It's probably going to kill a bunch of small music services.
Play Music was often a totally baffling experience.
If I wasn't paying them money and wasn't enrolled in any subscription, what happens when I type the name of a song I don't "own" into the Play Music app? Sometimes it starts playing the song; sometimes it starts playing ads, then fifteen seconds of the song, then silence; sometimes it starts playing the song, then random other songs somehow related to that; sometimes it suggests a "radio station" (?) of music similar to that song, and sometimes playing that station does nothing, or sometimes it plays a song and tells me I need to buy a service to hear more songs, or sometimes it plays that song, then an ad, then another related song, then an ad, then stops playing songs altogether and the app just doesn't play any music while showing me a UI that says it's trying to load and play a song.
One time I subscribed to a free trial of the Play Music streaming service and listened to a bunch of radio songs for a long time and thumbs-up liked them and I think this tailored me to hear more songs like the ones that I had liked, and that was pretty cool, I think. I could even see all my "thumbs up" songs later and replay the ones I liked! Then I paid for that subscription for a while, and then it lapsed, and then I could still see my thumbs-up songs but I couldn't play them anymore because I wasn't a subscriber, except sometimes picking some of them would play, and then sometimes it wouldn't. Boy I spent tens of hours, maybe hundreds, listening to Play Music songs and thumbs upping them this way. I've totally forgotten that experience and how baffling it was until just now.
Basically I could not figure out how to play music in Play Music.
Except for music that I "owned". In my Google Play Music collection, I "owned" some albums that I don't ever remember buying or "buying" for $0 and have no record or receipt of ever putting into my playlist. I looked, I looked for the transaction history about how these albums and songs entered my account, and I just could not find them at all.
One example was, um ... let me see if I can find it, oK I can't look it up in the Play Music app anymore because it's been decommissioned but I can open the YouTube Music app and look, hmmm okay, no songs in there? Oh, right, I need to sign out of YouTube account 'mherdeg' (mherdeg@gmail.com) and into YouTube account 'mherdeg@gmail.com' (mherdeg@gmail.com) because the Play Music=>YouTube Music Transfer Process only supported sign-in-with-Google YouTube accounts? which is not the kind of account I normally use in YouTube and not the one where I keep all my other playlists and listening history? Huh. Okay, switched to that other identically named account which is an empty shell. There's all that transferred music.
Right, so looking at that in the category called "uploaded", somehow just to pick one example, I can listen to an album which is an album I used to "own" in Play Music and I have absolutely no recollection of asking for it, the trippy psychedelic album "Bloom and Decay" by a band called "Giant Cloud" based in New Orealns? Which is fantastic music but I have no idea why I have the rights to listen to it or where it came from into my Play Music collection. There must have been some promotional offer of a whole bunch of $0 albums a few year ago?.
Truly it is like some kind of fever dream.
Oh, and back when Play Music worked, trying to play the songs I "owned" was very confusing on a new phone. What I would do was set up my brand new Android phone, sign in to my Google Account, then open Play Music and notice there were no songs. I would search for a song title from one of the albums I "owned" and it would show me the confusing song/radio/subscription streaming service experience mentioned beforehand, with no indication that I had access to this music. A quick Web search eventually found that I needed to toggle a setting to sync my Play Music music into Play Music, and after I toggled this setting and made sure wifi was on and closed and reopened the app I saw my songs, and then I could play them.
I did love love love Play Music for letting me download all my albums and play that music offline. In "offline mode" the experience was awesome for, you know, playing songs. Except that sometimes on a new phone it wouldn't actually download music, with a notification saying that songs were being downloaded but zero visible progress in the app after tens of minutes, and I couldn't figure out why, but usually rebooting the phone and waiting a while worked.
Why do you do this to yourselves, google employees on HN?
I'm almost disconnected from Google.
I am shocked at how easy it was to get away from everything but email.
The client has an option that claims to do some normalization that I hoped would prevent large deltas in volume between tracks - in practice this seems worse than what I got from the GPM player. I mostly listen to long heterogenous playlists on shuffle, so this probably wouldn't matter to people who listen to full albums.
I believe they have some monetization plan involving allowing higher bitrate playback, but I don't think I can really tell the difference.
I did try migrating to Youtube Music first and gave up after one too many annoyances.