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Viewed differently: it is ultimately a good thing that Youtube Music is bad, because otherwise, that would be another thing dominated by Google.

It's like people lamenting how sad it is that Windows mobile failed. Well, why would you want Microsoft to dominate both desktop and mobile market? Seems like a scary scenario.

In this perspective, I can appreciate how clueless Google can be sometimes. It's not a bug, it's a feature! ;)

Yeah, but I would like to have a good music product. I'm currently between options because nothing works for me. I was a happy Google Play Music subscriber for years. All they had to to was change the colour scheme and swap the backend and I would have been a happy camper. Now I have canceled my subscription and don't know what to use.

At the end of the day music isn't critical to me, so I don't really care if Google dominates it. If I had to switch I'm not too worried about being locked into something.

> YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.

Just dislike these songs/videos. At first all I did was play playlists I already had in YT since the 'my mix' (now "my supermix") playlist had random songs I listened to 5 years ago, but after about a week of using the 'my mix' and disliking songs, I started getting a bunch of great songs from artists that I otherwise had no idea about.

The problem is, OP already did this. So did I. How much in-fighting is there at google that they couldn't just port over the data?

Right now I'm pissed that Google tv doesn't have a working account switcher. If my wife watches music videos it retrains my YouTube music.

Also, youtube music sucks when it comes to spotty connections and file management. I have fiber at work and home, unmetered 4g, and 100gig free space on my phone. Why doesn't it just download everything? I loose service for hours on end and I come to find that it has either not saved any songs or it has deleted everything it can. Today I started an album and then hit a dead spot, and it had deleted all the songs before the track I was on, and not qeued up the rest of the album. Google music had a setting where you could tell it to allocate gigs of space and keep it full. This push to simplify user experiences is why I avoid apple, and I hate seeing it creep into google.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/11/30/google-tv-is-perfec...

Could not agree more. Even little stuff like my son who is on my family plan. He used Google Play Music all the time with no problems. When they forced us to move to YT Music, now it won't let him get the app because he's too young and YT isn't allowed. So I either have to give up all the parental controls that I need and use, or he can't access the family plan music subscription that I pay for and used to have with no problems at all, because I was forcefully migrated to a new service I didn't want when the old one was perfectly fine. I despise the new world we are in.

I'm about to go full self-hosted on a ton of stuff. Plex, Book Sonic, Next Cloud, etc. Then I can move when I want to move.

Edit: I actually bought a used (came from Google I believe) Dell R620 on ebay, loaded to the hilt (dual 8 core (16 total physical cores) E5-2650, 256 GB RAM, 10 600GB drives (SAS)). They're amazingly affordable. I paid around $750 with shipping. I can run a hell of a lot of stuff on that and since I'm mostly at home these days it will be blazing fast (way better than existing cloud stuff that is limited by my 20Mbps downlink, which is the fastest I can get). Nothing like a Gigabit connection to my "cloud" :-D

Unfortunately the problem with self-hosting these things is actually obtaining the content (mainly regarding movies since iTunes song purchases haven't been DRM protected for a long time). Getting the right set-up for removing DRM from your uhd/hd blu-rays is hard since hardware is constantly being updated (you might have to purchase second-hand blu-ray readers), and downloading them is technically illegal even if you have the physical media - not that the FBI is going to indict you for having a personal media library. I imagine books have the same issues if you're trying to get unencrypted digital versions of them.

Yeah some of it is a real pain.

I try to buy all my audio books from Downpour since they are DRM free, and music as you mentioned isn't a problem. I was very into music in the 90s/00s and bought nearly every CD I wanted and I ripped them into mp3s years ago. I may just budget a $100 or so to buy mp3s I don't have that I still want to listen to, and cancel YT music.

I don't often buy ebooks since I love physical paper, but when I do I try to buy DRM free or use Calibre/Apprentice Alf to strip the DRM and convert to epub.

Movies are a real challenge though. Plenty of older stuff I have on DVD and it's easy to rip, but it does take an enormous amount of effort to rip blu-ray. I may try to do an OTA antenna hooked into Plex for most of TV, but will probably keep CBS all access and a couple others for movies/shows/etc. So I'll self host most things :-D

I definitely get some nice new music on my supermix.

I also get songs I've already thumbs downed reappearing repeatedly. It's bizarre how bad it is in some respects, while still being decent in others. (They're not even new top hits being aggressively promoted. It's mostly 80s rock they'll toss in no matter how many times I say I "no, I don't like this song".)

Dude just stop giving Google the benefit of the doubt and switch to Spotify. Google has proven time and time again that their priorities lie within their advertising and their search engine - Everything else is a monetized side project.

I've tried Spotify, its great but their inability to upload your own music is a gamebreaker for me, since I listen to a decent amount of indie and obscure bands and songs

Apple Music allows this, and might be a better solution for you. A client is available on Android and Windows as well.

I'll second Apple Music. Transitioned to it from GPM".

Interesting to find out the Apple music has an app on Android. They actually might be the best alternative for me I've found so far

I've added a few of my own albums to Spotify. It's a tad convoluted but not difficult.

Spotify does let you upload your own music. (I’m a paying customer though so you might need that.)

Overall I’m very happy with Spotify but experience has shown that within a few years it’ll begin the slow and unstoppable turn towards Villainy.

Just tried it. My experience might be abnormal, but it seems glitchy and slow. A playlist that I already created with my offline songs synced with my phone, but playlist said 0 songs. No error messages, very unintuitive. Had to create a new playlist and add the songs again, still wasn't showing. Relaunched spotify on both devices two times and it finally showed up. And this is for ~20 songs. I wouldn't want to use this method on a big library.

Also, Spotify doesn't upload your music for streaming, its just a sync between your phone and computer that have to be on the same wifi, and keeps the songs downloaded on your phone. Wouldn't work for a collection bigger than your phones storage. I wouldn't even compare this to GPM.

Exactly. I can't play my 'uploaded' music on Spotify from the app on my TV

You can add custom music in the Spotify desktop client, and if you have a mobile device on the same network, it'll automatically upload it to that device as well. Not cloud based though.

When they bought Songza back in 2014 and integrated it into GP Music, I found their recommendations started to be much better

Its as if they threw that all progress out with YT Music.

I'm willing to give the service a few months to clean up major bugs and such and see how it is then, but I'm still looking for alternatives

Years later I'm still bitter about them buying and killing Songza, it was one of my favorite recommendation algorithms to date, probably second only to "The Upload" auto playlist on SoundCloud.

> YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.

Despite the fact that your Google Play Music "like" data is migrated into YT music, it doesn't seem to properly incorporate it in the algorithmically generated playlists.

What I've found is that I basically need to treat YT music as a clean slate, and specifically start playing and re-liking things (i.e., I'd re-play my favorite albums, thumb-down and thumb-up again the songs in them).

Now that I've done this, it's doing well enough - in some ways better than GPM was (multiple "mixes" presented as options with different clusters of artists in the summaries).

I can't say whether re-thumbing was what did the trick, or simply re-listening, though. And it's incredibly stupid that I should have to do this to make it work correctly.

Checkout this product I made a couple years ago after rdio shut down: It basically connects Spotify music info to YouTube songs: https://minotaur.fm

This is really neat. Well done.

Thanks! I built it several years ago and never really promoted it as it seemed to me like the ability to play on your phone was crucial, but not really possible to do with YouTube videos on iOS. Ahh well.

Had similar experiences. A funny bug was when I pressed the next button too fast for some reason my playlist was switched out with most popular (I guess). It was only Britney Spears and Justin Bieber.

Totally agree on the playlists too. I recently liked a video on youtube where a dude put guitar strings in his piano and for some reason yt music put that in my liked music playlist. It doesn't even contain actual music, just explanations of what he's doing

Not gonna lie. I'm very disappointed I can't sync my Stadia controller to my PC via bluetooth. Google gave out Stadia pros, but it's such a horrible idea ( instead of Xbox Game pass stadia forces you to buy additional games).

Google provides a gateway to the internet for most of us. They control what we find in most cases , but it's almost as if they have tons of money to spend elsewhere but lack any direction on how to do so.

Google is a startup incubator where all of their different micro-companies happen to be named "Google _________"

I'm kind of surprised that your YouTube Music recommendations are so bad. For me it gives by far the best suggestions of any music service I've used.

And still no Chromecast support.

Do you mean youtube music has no chromecast support? Really?

It does have Chromecast support, I've used it at least on Android and on music.youtube.com. I can't vouch for iOS though!

The apps do, but the website does not. music.google.com used to have native support, but to cast music.youtube.com you have to cast the tab, which is far less than perfect. (Instead of streaming directly from the CDN to the chromecast, casting a tab will stream from your desktop to the chromecast. It works so poorly that sometimes even the pitch changes slightly, like an old timey recording.)

No chromecast support from desktop music.google.com. you have to cast the Tab.

That is comical if true.

Google's real business is search and ads.

Everything else are hobby side projects.

Like the rich dude who can self finance that metal album he always wanted to record.

Just use Spotify, it's vastly superior to all other streaming platforms and basically runs the music industry these days.

I tried it for three months. It pauses randomly in my browser and Google Home. The "radio" feature repeats songs like crazy, the queuing is super confusing and inconsistent (it depends on the "type" of playlist you are listening to IIUC) and it consistently recommended me the same songs.

It had some nice features too, but I decided to quit. Now I'm just listening to my collection of mp3s but not super happy.