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Comment by ewmiller | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t heard a single consumer express enthusiasm for the switch to YouTube music. Anyone I’ve casually talked to about it is dismissive and doesn’t really understand what it's even trying to be. If anybody has heard anything from a user's perspective that is in favor of this, I would love to hear that argument. Otherwise I can only assume that this was a typical Google move where product people internally pushed for a rebrand to advance their own careers, at the expense of the user experience.

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Then let me be the first.

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.

Too bad it has worse playlist management than freaking Windows Media Player from 2004. Seriously, I can't fucking find my playlists. I can't organize them. I can't search for them. I can't even easily create new ones by dragging multiple songs into them. And the icing on the cake is they get polluted with my decade old playlists from YouTube.

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.

To be honest I remember Windows Media player 9 or 10 having really good library management. Used it until I switched to GPM.

Yea, as someone who listens to Nightcore/Japanese music, Youtube Music is by far the easiest way to listen and discover music. And the download offline feature has always worked great for me, a 100 songs uploads periodically to match what I've been listening to, so I don't run into the classic issue of using the same "I don't have service" music playlist.

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.

It's great right now for you. You don't worry about Google deciding to go about things totally differently in 18 months and shut it down? I don't pay for Google products because they have a shorter shelf-life than a bottle of ketchup.

> shorter shelf-life than a bottle of ketchup

You know, that doesn’t really work, because ketchup lasts for ages

If you don't like ketchup, I guess.

Maybe the reference wasn't obvious :)

https://youtu.be/3LYwrvSFrms?t=116

(Wouldn't it be funny if this link caused a DMCA)

And music you buy shouldn't?

I paid them monthly to rent access to music. If they shot down I shall be forced to go elsewhere, none the worse of.

I was excited about the catalog until I tried to add Electric Lady Land, and they didnt have a legit version, just a fan made amalgamation of differntly mastered singles from the album. Honestly disappointing.

I was a longtime Google Play Music All Access subscriber. One HUGE benefit that YouTube Music has is the available catalog. I like a lot of obscure music and remixes that no one else but YouTube has. I also agree that it's ridiculous that YouTube Music doesn't have all the features of Google Play Music. Still this was handled much better than most shutdowns where there is no migration path. I'm glad that Google is combining some redundant services. 5 more years and they might get their chat situation in order.

The switch to YouTube music was the last in a long chain of disappointments from Google, so two weeks ago I switched back to iPhone after 8 years of Android. I really, really wanted to like Android.

The story I’ve heard is that way more people are using YouTube for music listening than ever used Play Music, and that didn’t seem to be changing any time soon, so it doesn’t make sense to put any more resources toward Play Music.

So the lesson is: if you use Google products, you better hope you use them the way most people do, otherwise the company will take it away from you.

This is what it means to be a company with no vision.

I think the world would be a worse place if every product ever made was supported forever. There would be nobody left to work on making things better.

There are several places on the spectrum between total shutdown and perpetual support. Google hasn't made it vary far to the right on this spectrum.

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