Tell HN: All your Google Music deleted on February 24th | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: All your Google Music deleted on February 24th

48 pointschrisacky42 comments

I didn't buy that much on Google Music, it was mostly indie, self-published bands/groups who needed a platform, but from 24th All Google Music is being deleted and the platform shutdown.

This is the email I received:

> We'll soon delete all of your Google Play Music library and data

> On 24 February 2021, we will delete all of your Google Play Music data.

> This includes your music library, with any uploads, purchases and anything you've added from Google Play Music.

> After this date, there will be no way to recover it.

> You can download your Google Play Music library and data with Google Takeout, or transfer it to YouTube Music.

> As a reminder, with one click, you can still transfer your music library, including uploads, playlists and recommendations, to YouTube Music before 24 February 2021.

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Daily reminder: Piracy is not about price.

https://archive.is/tFp19

Piracy isn't only about price.

I regularly pirate movies that I've already purchased 2+ times (eg I already own on both VHS and DVD).

The friction of walking into another room to find my physical copy is greater than just downloading it on my laptop.

This is why I'm still discovering and managing my mp3s like it's the 00s (warez/torrents). Never know when it's all going to be shut down. These services are still good for discovering similar music, but always have local copies.

You could always use a service not managed by Google. Spotify for example has been around for years and will not close anytime soon.

I agree with this recommendation. When we are dealing with a company as large as and has as diverse a portfolio as Google, we must be heedful that as soon as they find one of their products troublesome in one way or another, they will shut it down. With a company like Spotify, they will fight for its survival as if their life depends on it.

With Google, it seems to be, "This was a fun experiment. We'll try something else now."

For music, I think the best option is to find indie labels who let you download and keep stuff DRM-free. Spotify is probably the best option for mainstream music.

Spotify does, however, sometimes lose their license to songs on the service. Maybe not often, but it's happened to me enough that I only rely on Spotify for discovery now -- when I know I like something enough to keep listening to it, I buy it.

What I like about Spotify is that the discovery features are good enough to be worth the price by themselves.

The discovery function of Tidal is by far my favorite. I've found so much new music - it's exciting. Takes me back to the Limewire days.

They deleted my curated playlist for programming while I was a paying customer and with zero warning. I just moved to a new service (and in parallel keep my playlist locally, with good old mp3 files).

Thanks for the warning, but unfortunately when it comes to Google one must never be surprised when their data is no longer accessible.

I need a new service reccomendation that isn't GMusic or Spotify, neither companies of which I would like to support financially.

I don't mind paying for a hosted service as I don't have the time nor the energy to manage my own multimedia service and would like to have good reliability when out and about.

Any ideas?

My ipod has never failed me. It stores and plays music.

I ditched Spotify for Apple Music last year (due to several issues with Spotify). The only thing I miss so far is a good web player. Apple Music offers one, but it crashes way too often. The iOS and even the Android app work just fine. Also, the price (at least here) is the same for both platforms.

You can pay for Apple Music using iTunes gift cards. If these can be bought with a discount in your area, Apple Music becomes cheaper.

TIDAL and Deezer are both quite good.

Why they deleted your playlist? Copyright issues?

Unlikely, given it only had songs available in the platform (i.e. I had not uploaded any songs myself).

To be more technically accurate, the playlist itself was not deleted, the ~600 songs in it were removed from the playlist.

Is this why they restructured as Alphabet? So they could transfer products back and forth between divisions and get promoted without building anything new?

When you get 'your data' ... which you 'purchased' (CDs last longer) ....better check through it to see how many Google links they stuck into it. (Ten years ago, they filled my Blogspot 'download' with them. Syonara forever, chumps.) Note that they want you, the purchaser, to transfer the library to another of their sites. They could do it (considering you've been a 'customer'). Cause they're moving their snake oil act on to the next town.

Why is anyone surprised when an advertising company stops supporting the flavour of the week side projects?

For the final quarter of the 2020 financial year, ~81% of Alphabet's revenue was from advertising.

They don't break things out much in their financial reports, it's essentially "Google Services" (the only profitable entry), Google Cloud, "Other bets" and corporate. The final three all lose ~$1B+ a quarter.

In the only breakout that has a profit (the vaguely named 'Google Services'), 87% of the revenue is from advertising. There's no indication of what % of the profits are from search, the "apparently not advertising" part of that breakout generates 13% of the revenue, but might easily be generating just 1% of the profit.

So, once again: Google is an advertising company. Everything else is a little side act, and just as likely to be dropped, because Ads are the only thing Google has ever worked out how to make money from.

I know the general feel with Google is "they'll shut this down too" and correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks to be more of a rebranding/merge save for the one click to port everything and lose nothing.

If that's true I just wanted to call it out since comments so far read like they're deleting content you've purchased with no recourse.

It's not an automatic transfer though - the customer has to manually transfer out their music. How many people would have read this email?

uhhh... anyone who actually uses the app is presented with the transfer button. You'd have to not have used the service for a very long time to not see the button

I would call it that, but Youtube Music is not just a rebranded service.

* Instead of a library of songs to listen to, you're listening youtube videos without the video. I make playlists with them and songs disappear randomly.

* The player is buggy. The music will skip, or randomly restart. Randomly a song won't play because it says the format isn't supported (which doesn't make any sense), and then the playlist stops altogether.

* In Google Play Music, you Liked songs and they would be in a Liked songs playlist. In Youtube you like videos and they are in a Liked Videos list. In Youtube music, after you've merged it, you now have a Liked list that is both your music from GPM, and every Youtube video you've ever liked that's also a song.

Youtube music is a drastic step backwards from GPM. I would've left for spotify already. but I appreciate also having Youtube without ads, and I don't want to pay for both services. I would've been happy with GPM sticking around forever with next to no updates, but Google always has to change something so managers can get their raises and promotions.

> ...library of songs...

This is patently false. YTM has a library of tracks and albums that is equivalent to spotify or Google play music. On your phone it's a totally separate app from youtube. In addition to the spotify-esque library of music it can also tap into yt, which has a longer tail of indie stuff.

> ... player is buggy ...

I don't experience exceptional buginess in the player, although there are things that annoy me (same with spotify). However you are moving the goalposts, I thought this was a rant about deleting data? Now it just sounds like a rant about Google changing ux.

* ... merging likes ...

I also did not experience this problem but they did screw up the order of my likes which was very annoying. This complaint is still off topic though.

> This is patently false. YTM has a library of tracks and albums that is equivalent to spotify or Google play music.

Then its completely separate library of tracks and albums randomly has songs disappear from my playlist or be unplayable in a manner indistinguishable from it sourcing its tracks from random youtube videos. My guess is that their native youtube music library does not have the breadth that their GPM one did, so some of the songs are from the community instead, and randomly disappear.

> I thought this was a rant about deleting data?

If you read the comment I'm replying to, they noted they didn't consider this a service going away if it's just a rebranding or a merger of features. I don't consider it just a rebranding, because they are removing a fully featured service and replacing it with a half baked one. I then proceed to explain the various ways it is quite half baked. Which is why my reply is on topic.

> I also did not experience this problem but they did screw up the order of my likes which was very annoying. This complaint is still off topic though.

I went from a curated list of Liked Songs in GPM to a hodge podge of those liked songs and every random joke song video I've liked since I started on Youtube. That playlist is now useless. That does pertain to my original point.

It isn't true that this is merely a 'they'll shut this down too' situation. After transferring music to YouTube Music, I now have to watch ads on the content I had purchased. When they sold me that music, they told me I wouldn't have to watch ads on the music I paid for.

In my eyes, this is theft. Shutting down a service is fine. Theft isn't. I don't accept that company name musical chairs absolves Alphabet of its responsibility to render to me the goods that I paid for. I see this as a rebranding, not a ceasing, so in my eyes Alphabet still has a responsibility to me as a custodian of the digital goods I purchased from them.

"The YouTube channel you're currently using isn't supported for the Google Play Music transfer."

Uhh... ok...

If you can afford to, just get a Synology NAS. Their audio station app [0] works quite well across devices.

[0] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/audio_station

I have been removing all my paid Google services one by one. it's a long process but so far I have managed my email, my drive and cloud, my streaming video service, and my webhosts and got repos.

everything is self hosted and runs better than Google half the time. I have a map plugin to use openstreet maps instead of Google maps, and I have everything running in a plug n play form factor. just plug into internet - wait 10 minutes for DNS to propagate - boom.

I'm sad to see Google Play Music go, I loved it.

I am now using YouTube Music, but it's a completely different product and a lot worse than Play Music. The "radio" in function in GPM was amazing, but in YouTube music it just randomly plays songs you listened too, so it combines rock songs with meditation songs, it's a mess.

Not only that, but when you export to YouTube Music from Play Music they give you the same experience as you would have had you not bought the music on Play Music. They make you watch ads to see the content you purchased and transferred. I'm sure this bug looks great in terms of revenue.

I transferred and i cant find where it all is on my youtube

I suggest trying the Google Takeout tool.

It's always funny when someone says that a product is going to be around just because big, stable Google made it.

Well I'm going to avoid buying more things from Google Books and Google Movies for a while. It's a little strange they didn't automatically transfer the music to YouTube Music.

My 'Thumbs Up' list appeared as likes on Youtube so I used a tool to download them all as mp3.

when could you buy music on Google Music (itunes style)? I was only aware they stored user music in the cloud and then later started a subscription streaming service.

Ugh this is my biggest concern about Google cloud

You can download an archive from takeout

Would it affect my music player

but, "don't be evil"

You cannot trust any google new product, there is always the real danger of them cancelling the project. Having a proprietary cloud, lots of engineers and good planning, I still cannot wrap my head around them killing services

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