A fate worse than death. (Joke but I was a heavy Google Music user before it suffered the same fate).
The forced deathmarch to YouTube Music and its advertisement hell was a massive "fuck you" for trusting Google to at least not be assholes if you're buying items from them. I had a huge library of music purchased on Play and nothing worked to backup/download them. All the purchases disappeared in YouTube Music. Google "support" with the issues was... exactly what you would expect.
I didn't get into podcasts until a few years ago during the pandemic. But I refused to ever consider touching Google Podcasts. On the one hand with Google you know the entity you're dealing with so there's a certain ease that the name has vs trusting a different company. But increasingly it's just not worth it. They're like an elephant grazing on the savanna and you're a dung beetle. You can often find that Google shit is usable and useful, but they won't even notice if they step on you. I avoid Google if I can avoid it.
Artist and album descriptions are largely gone, and so is the ability to view your listen count of songs, or sort songs in your catalog by listen count (which was my favourite feature of GPM). I suspect they're doing this because they've changed their accounting to get away with paying artists less (the % completion rate to 'count' has changed, or perhaps they're not counting some listens altogether)
The one saving grace of YTM is that its predictive playlists are actually pretty decent, and there are a lot of them.
I migrated my account too, since I have YT Premium anyway, but I don’t even know if that’s a feature anymore or how to access that aspect of my library, like, to add new songs from MP3s I own.
What kind of dysfunctional company deathmarches its users like this between two competing brands and products right in its own company, and is so committed to doing it wholesale that it's willing to mass-lose customers as well as features? The kind that puts its internal politics and product manager's careers and ideas ahead of customers' needs.
For at least a year after the transition you couldn't chromecast from YouTube Music on the web. The internal buganizer ticket on the matter was a shitshow. No accountability for the fact that we were killing something that worked and replacing with something that didn't even work with our own products.
Likewise, YTM on Android Auto was a similarly terrible backwards step in user interface and capabilities. It's been some years so I forget what irked me, but there was a laundry list of them.
At one point there were I think 3 Google product places where you could play podcasts; YTM, GPM, and Google Podcasts. None talking with each other about subscriptions, etc.
That and the whole idea of meshing a video recommendation system with a music recommendation system was just busted. My kids watched Minecraft or whatever videos on YouTube on the family (Android) TV So I started getting recommendations in YTM for video game music and what not.
The entire orientation of YouTube is around various random clips and the like. A music service like Spotify or (RIP) GPM is about albums and singles and EPs. YouTube's whole recommendation model wasn't built for it, IMHO.
GPM had a good recommendations engine. YTM pushed top 40 crap on me. I tried to tune it, but it failed.
I'd ask my Google display assistant device (I worked on them and had a couple around the house) to play some music, and it would spool up and start playing a video on YouTube instead. Because clearly that's what I'd want.
Harmonizing product lines and concentrating efforts and changing brands around etc is entirely reasonable. But you don't do it in a way that drops features and pisses off customers. You do it carefully and with respect. The way this played out was ... YouTube organization "won", Google Play team "lost."
I gave up, cancelled my sub, and bought Spotify.
Though conceptually it's still just weird. A video that I like on youtube because of the video component isn't necessarily a song I want to listen to as music. Also it really needs the ability to block music from certain artists.
If you're not the first pioneering version of something, you better be doing everything the others are doing, but better. Otherwise, what's the point of your product?