"Google doesn't care about you or what you think. Further, employees of Google aren't going to spend any time on products you care about if they can't get promoted by doing so."
It captures the narcissism that is tech perfectly.
Wanna see your career die quickly? Move to a maintenance project.
If there’s a hiring manager at Google that wants someone to babysit products that shouldn’t die, but can’t attract career-oriented people to work on, ping me :)
The best way to keep going is to diversify, not only being a generalist, but also extending the soft skills, don't funnel too much in technology for technology's sake, and the career will be just fine, even with maintenance projects.
My org, which is more focused on maintenance than any other org at Google, has among the highest promotion rates. I personally lead a team whose primary job is related to code maintenance rather than product features. I've been promoted in the top 5% of promotion rates during my career.
It is true that there are maintenance teams that stagnate. It may be a different story for product managers or vps, but for engineers I've seen tremendous career success focused entirely on maintenance.
Btw, I’m a web dev myself.
A healthy ecosystem should allow for innovations to take place from Apple, Google, and Mozilla and look at what sticks. As it stands now, Mozilla and Apple occasionally make new contributions to web standards but anything that chrome pushes effectively becomes one without any input from another company and that's kind of problematic.
So it's Chrome that doesn't implement a standard, and Safari that doesn't implement an ad-hoc competitor technology.
Why should they? It was a thing pushed and created by Google.
We might as well just have Chronium then it Google's whims become de facto/jure web standards implemented by all...
Google Chrome was compared to IE6 as being close to having 'the monopoly position as a browser'.
Indeed, Internet Explorer peaked at ~95% global browser market share in 2003-4 (when IE6 was the dominant version). Safari currently has <10% of the browser market share on desktop, <20% including mobile [1].
Sorry, Safari is nowhere close to being IE6 from this perspective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Google Music was a solution for a generation where streaming subscriptions didn’t exist yet. That’s fine - it’s ok for products to die as the market changes and employees to move on to more relevant stuff.
At least for me it was a good music streaming service, had all I ever needed.
Now I switched to YT Music. Not sure how that's any different. It still plays most of the music I had bundled up in the playlists I created over the years and that's fine I guess. It seems a bit easier to find live sets from festivals with YT Music so that's a plus.
Killing streaming subscriptions alternatives because they're on the decline definitely pushes that decline, even if it could have plateaued at some point where the service could have stayed viable.
that's just business and economics, isn't it? Like how an economy (GDP) always has to grow, regardless.
> work on something that a minority of people care about
then that can be a very viable business plan. In fact, pg probably has an essay about that. Maybe the "do things that don't scale" one?
You left out the "if you don't constitute a viable market" part (expressed by the parent as "nobody but aging millenials still does X), which makes all the difference, though.
That's a wrong take out of OPs comment. They specifically mentioned that except for a niche subset of users most people don't store MP3s in their phones to listen to. There is nothing wrong for a service to adapt to their new customer base. Why should they staff niche projects because some small % of users (and declining) want to keep using it and provide better alternatives?
Because killing off products has given Google a reputation that stops tens of millions of people using any of the fancy new products that Googlers build and launch. In the long term all the effort Googlers put in to new products is a waste of time.
This should be qualified. Killing off products without an alternative has given that reputation. As long as they provide a viable alternative with effective migration it should not count as "killing off". But I hear you, its the perception that matters too.
I mean in all fairness, For the price gouging I see for storage on phones, I can buy an mp3 player (with a nice DAC), a huge SD card, and then load it on there. That's why I don't store music on my phone.
I used a standalone MP3 player for years in addition to my phone, because I couldn’t find a phone with a decent DAC, but now the existence of Bluetooth DACs means I have less to lug around.
Fair enough, but that still makes you a niche subset. For a vast amount of people in the world, streaming music suffices.
A couple years back storing music was the case in emerging markets too because cell phone internet was expensive and terrible. However, now with 3G+ and cheap plans the number of people who want to store music and listen to it is reducing. Nothing wrong with services adapting IMO.
You on the other hand are right to have your own preferences with storing and listening to music (maybe it is a curated list, old songs not available for streaming) - valid reasons. But then you should find alternatives.
I find the Google/Startup dichotomy here fascinating. We are on hackernews, a site focused on startups. Pivoting dramatically, including throwing away your entire customer base for a different population, is considered an essential part of running a startup. But if a big company has a product that is obviously stagnating at a small userbase then the community demands that it be supported in perpetuity.
There is a pair of Cole Haan shoes I really like. I bought several of the same exact style over the years. It was eventually phased out. I can't buy it anymore. Is Cole Haan narcissistic for not offering me the shoe I want?
Is it narcissism, or good business?
Essentially, the bigger you get the harder it is to go after "small" opportunities. But some of the biggest disruptions come from those "small" problems.
It's a fine way to look for niches to exploit for a startup.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
It’s debatable whether many people outside HN actually hold a grudge; Google’s overall favorability ratings are crazily high. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Stadia had a rough launch because of Google’s reputation.
Shoes are a bad analogy because there is little switching cost; you just ties a different pair of laces and you’re done. If you had five years of playlists on G Music and now you have to move them to Spotify, that’s a major project. (Source: I did this, and it took me many hours).
Put differently, as a happy customer, you don’t want the company to pivot. It’s usually bad news for all of the existing happy customers. A successful pivot is great for the company, hopefully great for the new happy users, and very disruptive for the old customers. In the best cases the net utility is even positive.
(edit, made the odds clearer)
As I can see, their only edge is that they own a global content delivery network which in the best case might be able to give them a few years' head-start in terms of performance vs. other players that don't own IP infrastructure. (It's a recent development that cloud-hosted gaming is even viable from a latency perspective). But that doesn't seem like the core long-term problem; it might give you a first-mover advantage but I don't see that being enough to build a defensible moat in this space.
I feel like if startups ran their business like google runs their products, they'd fail pretty quickly. Am I off base here?
Google are big enough and generate enough profit that they can afford to have entire divisions of developers who are kept around in case they're needed one day. That doesn't make those people good developers though. Obviously there are some very capable people on those teams, but if they're genuinely talented why aren't they working on Search or Ads? That's what makes Google money, so that's why the best people end up, not on little side projects.
It's garbage. It's barely usable. I'm going to have to switch to Spotify.
Google always does this thing where it trashes a mature service and replaces it with something really new and immature that doesn't fit the use case of their previous customers in the hopes that they'll acquire new customers. But there's no sales pitch for Youtube Music. It doesn't do anything new. It's just, "the last one wasn't as successful as we'd like, so let's change things up a bit." And with an attitude like that, the next one won't be successful either. Which is why Google keeps doing this over and over.
They have corporate commitment problems. They never take a service and make it good, they just scrap it and start a new one in the hopes that they'll luck into a big hit. They've had like a dozen different instant-messaging apps in the past decade, and none of them ever caught on, because they keep scrapping them. I couldn't even tell you what the current iteration is. I used to use Google Allo a bit, which was their last one, but then they scrapped that and made this most recent one. I don't know why they do this.
Just import them into the music app on my laptop, sync my library, and boom those tracks are available everywhere, just like google music. I actually like it better, since it's an actual app and I don't need to upload the tracks through chrome – I don't use chrome, I use firefox, and I used to have to use chrome just to upload my music.
Best shoes I’ve ever owned...
When Google tries to be disruptive in an emerging niche, it does it with a backing (brand & money) that could effectively snuff the smaller (and more willing) competition that it finds already operating in the arena. It enters as the 800lbs big G, smashing everything in its wake. Then sometime later, loses interest and goes home with its ball, leaving its users and the surviving smaller competition to figure out what's next.
Edit: If the service truly represents a dead end, why not sell it?
The practical reason is that it's statically compiled out of the monorepo and hosted on borg behind GFEs so there's really nothing to sell except the codebase and infrastructure of Google of which a snippet is the service in question, and the licensing that makes it possible is probably non-transferrable.
That's not a practical reason, if it was a small company they would sell it.
The real reason is that Google would prefer to kill the service than have it continue with another owner which would compete with other Google offerings. And compared to Google's overall value, they don't particularly need the sale price.
Why not both?
The other problem is that if it's a dead or dead-end service then who would buy it? Maybe VC is easier than I thought... Perhaps Google values services more than most. They certainly spend a lot when acquiring other companies. Who would pay $2B for Google Reader or Daydream?
I think the other thing that was unstated in my last comment is that a lot of Google products are not much more than a veneer over material design and a bigtable or spanner backend. What is there to sell aside from the concept, glue code, and design work? The data? Now there's something that would really get people up in arms.
If you want to argue that the data Google has is very valuable then I agree wholeheartedly. It's also not going to sell that data which would be suicide from a privacy perspective. Letting new products use existing data is also pretty valuable, but doesn't make the resulting product as useful to anyone else.
I guess also, a service that is ‘dead’ to google might be a huge userbase to another company.
Yes. Absolutely.
First, shoes and music streaming are NOTHING alike.
Many products like shoes are so close to mass customization. Levis finally, mostly got smart about this.
Why can't I reorder the exact same glasses, shoes, jeans that fit?
It's mostly because of the broken feedback loops, missing backward flow of information. The designer, fashion buyer, PHB absolutely knows what you should want. Your opinion is moot.
Oh gosh it'd cost so much to build the infrastructure, complication, returns, we'd have to pay laborers a few pennies more blah blah blah.
Excuses.
I don't care.
Just make the shoes I want and I'll be a loyal customer forever.
PS- I asked LA Eyeworks to resume making the Big Bodhi (John Lennon, Steve Jobs) glasses for 20+ years. The pair I bought in the 90s were finally beyond repair. The lady I bought from said she could sell two dozen pairs overnight. I visited the original LA Eyeworks store twice, to make a personal appeal. Nope. Can't be done. Not possible. (The Big Bodhi are XL size, for my big pumpkin head.)
PPS- Speaking of Cole Haan... I had a pair that I absolutely loved. Bought them for working conventions. Standing on that concrete all day for 3-4 days. Sucks. Think of fashionable postman shoes. Gods, I loved those shoes. LOVED THEM. Best shoes I've ever owned. I tried so many times to replace them. I'm so mad at Cole Haan. I LOATHE them. Apparently they were bought by Nike or something and completely went to shit.
A mirror might help with your narcissist detection. There's a lot more involved in manufacturing than one person or even 20 people wanting it and that 3D printers exist doesn't change the equation so much. They've been around for a while. The short of it is a larger market is far more appealing than your brand of customer loyalty.
https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/blog/category/make-it-yours/
Mea culpa: Worked for fashion retailer on recommendation engine. Have some experience with the players.
Or would you like to dive into the logistics of customized manufacturing when applied to ~$200 items?
I'll save myself some time and just skip to The Correct Answer:
Made-to-order is the next growth opportunity. (Fast fashion has been played out.)
I'd watch someone like StitchFix or Trunk Club. They'll shorten the supply chain somehow (partnership, M&A, investment). Start offering made to order on select items. Strategically.
They'll need to do better measurements. Add MTailor features or equivalent.
Some are doing pop-ups, concierge. I'm now bearish on that approach. Mostly because of coronavirus. But I just can't think of any of the current players getting that kind of smart. I'll be delighted if someone proves me wrong.
I tuned out about 18mo ago. So haven't kept up. I'm told there's an MTailor like thing for sizing glasses.
I still don't have a clue how someone can do remote shoe sizing. Right now, everything's inferred from returns. But that's like diagnosing TBIs using phrenology.
I'm sure Amazon will continue to try any thing and everything. I haven't looked at their latest fashion effort. Mostly because whatever they do is a non-starter. Authenticity is table stakes for fashion, fast fashion, and therefore made to order. They'll certainly steal other people's lunch money, but are otherwise constitutionally incapable of anything new. Further, Amazon is entirely wholly hostile to authenticity. For them to pivot towards would invalidate their raison d'être. It could happen. I'm just betting against.
"...when applied to ~$200 items?"
You crack me up.
Facebook, Amazon, and Google are no longer the new underdogs and are old enough to be in the disenfranchisement trough. They will eventually stabilize like Apple and Microsoft.
Yes and no. I would argue that small projects are a misalignment of resources for FAANG companies. For example, niche music streaming services are better left to smaller startups who can easily solve those problems.
FAANGs should allocate their resources on big problems that others would not have the resources to tackle. Because if the FAANGs don't, no one else would be able to feasibly attack those problems.
The upside is the big problems get solved and there's smaller problems left on the table for startups to flourish on.
That's a catch-22. You have to be pretty big to be able to license this stuff at all.
I completely agree that a FAANG company would choose to prioritize big problems over small, but the essence of tech these days is how casually they might solve a problem, kill off any startups that might have also been pursuing that problem, and then discard their solution some time later with no regard for the users of that solution or acknowledging the dead startups that didn't have the resources (or will) to compete.
Because a product they have shipped no longer serves the company's interests does not mean it no longer serves the user's interest. And yet these companies casually kill off these things without regard to the impact it has on those users. That lack of empathy, that focus on what is good for the company and company employee's who focus on what is good for them, is the narcissism here.
I was trying to talk in the more "general" sense than the specific sense. A company with empathy would never have shipped the music service in the first place if it didn't intend to support it as a product going forward and with an end of life strategy that accommodated the users who adopted it. To illustrate with an example:
Non-narcissistic company:
We have this thing which manages a music library, it isn't part of our core mission but it is likely useful to people.
Okay, put together a plan for sunsetting it if it turns out that it doesn't make sense to support it. Then when you launch it, make sure people know what will happen in the event we decide to end of life the product.
Launch product, ... time passes .. then sunset it. Activate the sunsetting plan.
Nobody is surprised, the plans were already in place and the users already knew what would happen if it came to this, they feel sad but they knew this was something that could happen.
Narcissistic company:
Hey we got this thing which works and is trendy, it manages a music library and it will poke our competitor in the eye because they think they have a monopoly on managing peoples music. Should we ship it?
Hell yeah! Let's hype the hell out of it and really make competitor look bad. They will waste so much time and effort trying to figure out how to respond!
Launch product ... time passes ...
Hey, that thing we launched still costs us money and the competitor has long since moved to a subscription service which we can't do and nobody in the company wants to work on this dog cuz its old and tired anyway.
Okay, take it behind the barn and shoot it. Turn off the servers and free them up for other things we can use to get good press!
But the users?
Oh people still use this crap? Tell you what refund them what they paid, hahahahahahahahahahahaha. That was so funny. Yeah, like we owe them anything. Just turn off the damn servers, there are like six really interesting things with lots of buzz words we could be showing off with those machines and storage.
Streaming services are prone to sudden acts of mass extinction such as: api changes, licensing snafus, unprofitability of business model, Yoko Ono being in a huff that day.
My only problem is backups, and storage is pretty cheap, much cheaper than vinyl. On a new build I install foobar2000, copy a few gigs of music to local and I'm good to go.
Call me a dinosaur, but I like own a copy of something. It's a less disposable relationship with the music.
Bowie apparently hated how Lets Dance (the song) turned out, I had a remastered album where it was replaced with some dire 1990's techno version.
And let's not forget probably the most common streaming flaw: internet outages.
If someone want's to talk to me I just press ctrl+shift+E to pause, don't need to find a window on the computer. Tired of the song playing? Press ctrl+shift+b for next song in whatever program/game I'm in at the moment. (My winamp has quake-controls because that was what I was playing when I found the global hotkey settings.
I load my tunes on a USB stick and play them in the car. Never worry about connectivity, outages, or data plans. And it remembers where it left off when I turn the key on again.
I tried playing my phone through the AUX port, but nobody has yet made a mini audio jack that has a solid connection (always gotta wiggle it or turn it, like a cheap potenciometer).
Most of the time though, the people who don't move on simply age and get grumpy claiming that kids these days are horrible and don't understand the value of the thing that they still love.
That doesn't mean no one cares about it; it means that the licensee doesn't see profit in renewing it.
They know that most users will keep their subscription active despite the lost content.
And "It really whips the Llama's ass" means nothing to the kids these days.
Nirvana CDs are trivial to find; hell, if you're looking for virtually any music older than ten years it's going to be on physical media; but most of it isn't digitized.
And the new stuff? Bandcamp is great, and I get to keep the mp3s.
Even if ıt was the case that vanishes from the surface of earth, it's not that different from last physical copy getting scratched.
Those who have them begin using them as frisbees, decoration or simply trash them.
When I bought that Nirvana CD I bought it for life, and no one has the right to revoke my ability to listen to it.
There is a difference.
99% of my music never was in a cultural prime-time
And people who happen to enjoy music that was truly never prime-time should thank the parents of the musicians who sponsored the free music creation. It wasn't tech or platforms that enabled it, it was VC/Angel investor money and will vanish as soon as the money dries out.
For plenty of music that I listed to neither was in play (for example https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piosenka_turystyczna )
Plenty of music that I listen to is not available at all on Spotify. Some of entries will never be there (for example, I have some private recordings of music done with my family).
Some cases are not economically viable to be published, but it is not the same as "no one cares about it".
Which is why I like GOG
It's a drag to open Steam, or other, and find a game has stopped working because it can't auth with non-steam DRM, or a recent update has broken or removed features and the developer has abandoned the product.
I've experienced numerous beloved shows come and go from Netflix, some which I have no idea where to stream. That behaviour is fine for when I'm effectively channel surfing, but when I have a specific experience in mind it's garbage.
I don't trust buying DRM-laden content from most retailers because of the stories of accounts being locked or purchases being removed.
And then there's that I spend enough time traveling in poor-cellular regions...
I swear, DRM'd streaming just simply isn't suitable for _cherished_ experiences.
Yoko Ono's CDs are a guilty pleasure of mine. They're oddly captivating in their awfulness.
There were only a couple of exceptions. Very very old movies that I thought I might have trouble sourcing again if I ever wanted to watch them.
I was carrying those movies around for no particularly good reason. I wasn't likely to watch them again, and if I did there was a pretty good chance that they were already on X streaming service.
I know that this is not a solution that is viable to 99% of people who just want the convenience without the technical hassle. However, I think it's really sad that things turned out to become a dichotomy between owning and renting your music instead of a choice between managing your collection yourself vs. having someone else host it for you. I will claim that many people, if asked, would prefer to own their own music and be free to move from one hosted platform to another if they so desire, and not be limited to buy their music from a single provider. It would also result in a healthier market.
I'm a Zoomer with a decent collection of mp3s[0]. Silicon-Valley types tend to grossly underestimate just how "old-fashioned" the rest of the world is.
[0]:
[~/Music]$ find . -name "*.mp3" | wc -l
3157Thanks!
> cmus — C* Music Player
> Small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems.
..But apparently no longer in active development?
I can't think of anyone in their 20s with whom I interact who don't use Spotify, personally. It's all I see amongst the younger colleagues at work. Of that age group outside of work, everyone's 'year in review' music summaries on social media are spotify-generated, and everyone who sends me 'hey check out this song' links are sending them for Spotify (with a few youtube videos I guess).
I'm sure there are people, don't get me wrong, but Spotify seems so ubiquitous amongst everyone I know who is in their 20s (even at arm's length) that I definitely believe my library of mp3s and player make me a product of my age and the odd one out.
My wife and I are both 40s+; she has access to that library on her machine, but prefers Spotify for many reasons. Only weirdos want to own their own (music, video, text) libraries, most others would rather have someone else be responsible for the curation of that portion of their mental space.
Alien Sex Fiend: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6WVnBgqJfj9Iw9gpBed9fJ?si=zd...
The Jesus and Mary Chain https://open.spotify.com/artist/4rjlerN21ygkIhmUv55irs?si=-y...
The Damned: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6VeL8VhaMjHTPc5uovFl3h?si=q9...
Soft Cell https://open.spotify.com/artist/6aq8T2RcspxVOGgMrTzjWc?si=va...
Sex Dwarf - Original by Soft Cell https://open.spotify.com/track/7A5qOucdF0zyXo2x7vAoCO?si=nno...
Sex Dwarf - Remastered by Soft Cell https://open.spotify.com/track/6TaHShmHB955lxcJ92V0gs?si=cXo...
Sex Dwarf - Original, Deluxe Edition by Soft Cell https://open.spotify.com/track/7bt41cmNUkjCP8CQekIwBO?si=0tl...
Spotify and Netflix are the two things where when I say I don't have an account for them I generally expect a weird look.
It lost its enormously deep catalog some years ago, where I found oddities like (untitled), and the recent spat of original content has been disappointing.
Moreover, it's lost its appeal as a safe platform for kids' content; given that while I can limit my children's access to certain shows with a passcode, _I cannot hide_ the shows! Only someone without kids would design a catalog with parental locking that cannot filter locked content.
My wife finds the aggrandizing of violence and cruelty found in American television to be distasteful, and I find it boring; and so we often find ourselves looking elsewhere after loading Netflix and finding mostly violent content.
We do enjoy their cooking shows; but we're having better luck with Disney+ and Curiousity Stream for general family entertainment.
At what point is it "cancelling" instead of "renewing your subscription"?
I used Google Music for this, for a while at least, but gave up on it when it became clear that it was inevitably heading for the Google Graveyard. I'm not sure I want to bother with Spotify, and I transcoded my FLACs to Opus to put on my phone's SD card. Foobar2000 for Android takes care of music playing now.
I also listen to my own music files ripped from CD. For that, the Sansa Clip used to be great until the headphone connection broke.
Uhh... Sorry to break it to you, but... I... I think that makes you a millennial.
Seems so. The original post saying "anyone in their 20s" confused me. I'm not really familiar with all this generation and millennial talk. But it does annoy me when people shoehorn generations into certain behavioral patterns stripping out their individuality.
It's usually better to talk about Generations X, XY, Y and Z rather than millenials because of that.
Or will that generation grow with an acceptance that everything is ephemeral subject to the whim of corporate licensing? That seems a bit sad.
It was wonderful until that hard drive failed. I didn't have a backup (because of course I didn't, that hard drive was expensive and the cloud didn't exist). After that, I never did amass another massive collection of music like that.
So in a sense, yes, I kind of do now treat most media as ephemeral and don't place too much value on maintaining copies of them. There's always interesting music to listen to and books to read and video games to play. Having a physical or digital copy of it hoarded away in a hard disk locally simply isn't that important to me.
In other words, it very much depends on the country.
What about selection bias and people who are not posting 'year in review' music summaries?
I'm so sick of it.
What leads you to this conclusion?
But it’s not only race discrimination at play, there are other possible discriminations also more powerful than age, like gender, income or class.
So you put more weight to a discrimination that affects you the most because you probably don’t belong to other categories, hence the guess that you are a white male.
I am probably over reacting given the HN demographic and also because you did not do it in bad faith but just wanted to point it out.
Exactly this. While I get your sentiment, and your assumption is correct, I'd agree to disagree that "one discrimination is worse then another", because (for me) it always boils down to how each individual experiences the discrimination.
One simply cannot state that "your discrimination is not as important as mine".
Not all of us have mainstream taste. Unless you like the music that’s most popular in your particular corner of the world, some of your favorites are likely to be missing from streaming services—and even if you fit nicely into that mold, there are still licensing issues at times. Then what?
For example:
- I tend to favor European music, but I live in North America. Many of the artists I like are mainstream in Europe, but their music isn’t licensed for streaming here. I can see the tracks on Spotify with “Show Unavailable Tracks” toggled, but if I try to play them, I’ll get an “unavailable in your region” error. It doesn’t really matter which service I use: if it’s region-locked in one, it’ll be region-locked in all of them.
- Some of the artists I enjoy are indie bands. I can often buy their music on Bandcamp, but it might not be on streaming services.
- Some bands have albums and tracks (particularly covers and remixes) that keep running into licensing issues and dropping from streaming services, even if they’re mainstream.
- Some bands have older, forgotten albums that are quite good, even if they’re older than me. Unfortunately, if those albums aren’t as popular as their newer works or were demos, good luck getting ahold of them, even if you try to pirate them.
- I like the soundtrack and theme song from a movie or video game. Can I stream it? 50/50, regardless of how mainstream it is.
How about a more concrete example? Cling to Me by LP. You can find low-quality versions on YouTube, and LP is a songwriter for several modern pop artists[0]—but it’s a demo, so you can’t stream it. You can technically play it in YouTube Music, but the quality is absolutely terrible, probably because the videos are either old or reposted. This is from an artist whose own songs play at my local supermarket, and who wrote music for other mainstream artists. But nope—can’t stream that one.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_(singer)
> She has written songs for other artists including Cher, Rihanna, the Backstreet Boys, Leona Lewis, Mylène Farmer, Céline Dion and Christina Aguilera.
Have an mp3 collection that you actually control?
As far as I can tell, the opposite is true.
Everyone at Google wants to work on new products until they're released. Then the entire companies moves on, regardless of the number of users.
This decision seems based entirely on a desire to rebrand and rebuild (an unfortunately common and user-hostile pattern at Google) rather than usage stats.
Yup.
I've only compared it to FM on short trips to Sweden though, since FM has been shut down for years here in Norway (except for local radio stations), so my experiences may be positively impacted by the mostly interference free life here. My car speakers aren't exactly high end either.
Worth a buy regardless though, it's really nice to be able to listen to whatever you want without planning it beforehand.
I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30AGunxyMeA
I taped a bunch of episodes of Brain Pain from the late 80's. That stuff ain't available anywhere. Some C89.5 shows from 30 years ago, too. Wish I'd taped a few more of them.
When phone makers all decided to ditch the headphone jack, I wanted to still be able to charge the phone while also streaming music/podcasts and hearing nav over the speakers. Picked up a cheap Bluetooth receiver that plugs into the aux-in and went back to playing my personal music library from Google Music while on the road.
I'm not a "millenial" as I'm rapidly approaching my mid-40s. I don't want more subscriptions to streaming services, but I did love the convenience of easy access to my backed up music.
On one hand, I try to be realistic with things like this and with Google Photos. It's shitty when you find something that really works well and doesn't cost extra. But I also understand that by virtue of not having an easy drop-in replacement for free (or cheaper than similar offerings from Amazon, Apple, etc) there is certainly value in such services. Value implies a cost and I'm not surprised when an eventual price tag shows up.
My gripe is partly (admittedly) that I'd become spoiled by the free service, and partly that these things are only free for as long as they serve some other purpose--whether that is training photo algorithms, rapidly growing a userbase, or just having a product to compete in a market. When they go away, it makes me feel like I fell for something, even though I was already getting something for (nominally) nothing. It's not logical and I'm still working out my opinion on these sorts of things.
My google play music yesterday killswitched itself so I installed "simple music player" from f-droid and took my google play purchases from google takeout. Good riddance.
Also youtube music absolute sucks with its sound quality and ads.
Also, to content disappearing entirely for random reasons.
Since we're talking F-Droid, I can highly recommend "Vanilla Music" for a plain "play a bunch of MP3s" experience. My favorite feature is that you can set it to refuse playing music on the phone speakers (only on headphones).
frank@serve:~$ find /mnt/audio/music -type f|wc -l
134594
In other words, both young and old keep local collections, this is not purely an age thing. My 16yo daughter uses both our own library as well as commercial streaming services, my 9yo daughter (who doesn't have a phone yet and will not get one for a while) primarily uses our own library.
Just like some folks are preppers who keep enough food and necessities for a few months to years while others live from one Über-eats to the next, so do some curate their own library (etc.) while others rely purely on commercial services.
It's death by a thousand cuts for Google at this rate.
What if search falters? If Apple or Amazon beats it, or at least cuts the most profitable aspects of it. Or perhaps people finally care about privacy and switch to Duck Duck Go. I fear google will fall apart - all of their loss leaders that serve search will die, and it will become Gmail / Youtube co. Its cloud is on life support as it is, and IT in-the-know assumes all their B-grade services will be cancelled. Plus the trust-busters are knocking! If I were to bet on which FAANG will have the most trouble in this decade, it's [G]oogle.
Bing?
I'm a long time Spotify user and didn't know about this.
I know about https://support.spotify.com/us/article/listen-to-local-files... which isn't the same thing at all.
Haha, I still have my stereo from 1980 or so, run it all day every day. Only these days, I drive it with a Grace Digital media player that sucks the files off of the desktop through the wired LAN.
I don't play directly from my desktop because I strongly dislike the bleeps and bloops from the computer, and those stupid autoplay websites. Easier to just disable the sound from the computer.
The computer stereo output also underlays an extremely annoying 60 cycle hum.
The sound quality from the computer DAC is horrible. Nice to use a real stereo (Carver amp and preamp for the win!).
I have lots of music that is not available on streaming services, so being able to upload and stream songs is a must for me. Spotify only offers syncing between devices which is definitely not the same.
A very strange thing I found is that, when you migrate your data from GPM to YTM, Google seems to "forget" all of its algorithmically curated data based on likes and play history. It's taking me a long time to "train" YTM back to where GPM was before the migration.
All of this is really disruptive to users though, and it's why I have taken to self-hosting the music I really care about via Jellyfin.
If I wanted to watch music videos I'd open YouTube. I can't remotely recommend this to anyone, let alone my father.
You're probably the only person I've heard from that has said that. I think YTM is marginally worse in most respects. I'll keep using it because I think spotify is also lacking and getting ad-free YouTube (which I'm grandfathered into) is a pretty good feature.
In particular its radio algorithm for finding similar music was miles ahead of Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, etc....
I'm sure I'll be wrong but I suspect Youtube Music will also be cancelled. It's a worse service so why would anyone choose it?
I do agree on the politics of googlers though: once released its ignored.
Ability to store your own music was an attempt to create a killer feature they needed to keep that service running at all.
Google is teaching us the same thing over and over: - Scale over user comfort, general usability and features. - What you see is what you get. No evolution for next decade. - Service may be closed sooner and it will be pain in the ass to transfer to "the next new thing". - The "next new thing" might not be around when the previous one is shut down already.
Being able to upload your own music and play it from any device is huge, yet the only alternative I've found is iBroadcast
It is self-hosted, but that's more a question of desire than ability I'd imagine
Google Music wasn't for keeping 20k songs in mp3 format. It was a streaming service, that just allowed uploading your own songs.
But e.g. I used it as a music streaming service which was superior to Youtube Music which I use now (Youtube music has just one advantage - it has dark mode, but one that doesn't care about color-blind people, e.g. turning on shuffle is for me invisible :( ).
Do I count as an aging millennial?
that's why they proposed to (and i did) move my 35k songs to ytmusic?
in any case, this all downgraded my experience so significantly (due to no background playing, shitty interface etc) that i even considered starting paying for it. maybe that was actually their point.
but thanks, google, not today - since i work from home due to covid anyway, i have no need for it anymore
That sounds like a terrible way to lead a company.
Im talking businesses that are easily $xxM ARR businesses if you were run them alone. The FAANGs just dont care. But there have been a lot of startups that started this way, so the downstream effect is that the smart people will just leave and do that project on their own and reap the profits.
The other way of looking at is that it is a misalignment of resources for FAANGs to work on small projects. They have so much power and resources, that they should probably leave the small projects to the smaller companies and focus on solving big problems others would not have the resources to tackle.
And yet iTunes Match remains in service.
I'm sure you can avoid the music video aspect but I could be bothered figuring that out after enforced disruption to my app habits and so just changed provider.