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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

The degradation of Google Play Music into YouTube Music has to be one of the most disappointing product merges in history. All of the power functionality disappeared. I can't even find the music I want anymore without great effort.

As a consequence, I'm listening to my favorite artists less frequently, and haven't even thought about concerts, festivals, albums, etc.

A dumb but rich tabular music + metadata store would be a game changer. Add in tags and multi-dimensional ranking, and I'd be in heaven. Add an API, and I'll gladly pay $50/mo.

I want iTunes 1.0, but with the ability to sync between the cloud and all of my devices. With smart playlists that can operate over my tags and ratings.

That's it. No music videos, no real need for album art or lyrics, but certainly no UI removed for simplicity or dumbing down the product.

I want to index and traverse my music in my own way.

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I miss GPM so much. No one I know in person knew it existed, yet they still get to listen to my rants about Google killing the one true music service.

I too have been finding music discovery difficult since GPM shutdown. YouTube Music is getting better at discovery fortunately, but I'm not finding multiple new albums/artists per week, more like 1-2 new albums or artists every couple weeks.

One of my favorite GPM features was the "concerts in your area", that is the only way I knew that some artists were coming through my city. It was one of the last features they added. The new album release feature was fantastic as well, although YTM has it now and it works pretty well.

Also, GPM would cache music locally on your device as you played it. If you were offline, you could just display explicitly downloaded music along with the cached music, it was the best for driving through the mountains or flights. If you were playing a playlist, it would cache multiple songs ahead of the current song, sometimes I'd get 30 minutes out of service before the music would stop.

I'll probably complain about the death of GPM for many more years.

YTM supports caching music locally much like GPM did, although I believe you have to explicitly specify what you want to cache on your device.

> One of my favorite GPM features was the "concerts in your area", that is the only way I knew that some artists were coming through my city.

SongKick and Last.fm have solved this problem for me for years. I haven't used them for concerts since before COVID, so I don't know if they're still good for shows.

Seems like something similar happened to Google Pay[1] as well. With a few exceptions Google seems to suck at discerning between good and bad products. It'll shelve the likes of Reader or neuter Google Play Music, but insist on pushing garbage like G+.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-pay-r...

To be fair, Reader and Google Play Music did both outlast G+, so it's not like the garbage fairs any better.

This one boggles my mind. To take something that worked resonably well and degrade it into...whatever it is now is such a bad feeling. I guess Resume Driven Development is alive and well there.

I'm glad I'm not alone in lamenting the demise of Google Play Music.

itunes match is what you want.

You can upload your own music to the cloud, and whatever matches existing ones just matches to the itunes store so you dont actually have to upload everything - this is the 'match' in the 'itunes match'.

And it's $25/year.

With the caveat that matching process might mis-match things when the same song exists in subtly different versions and there isn't a good way to manually override it when that happens.

I really loved GPM too and them merging it with YouTube Music pushed me to Spotify

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