Google Play Music worked perfectly well for me, and I used it as a Spotify alternative, not even for the music library features.
The switch to YouTube Music has been terrible.
Dead simple things don't work: my son would listen to a specific white noise track at night over his Google Home Mini.
Previously, we could tell it to play the song, then say "repeat on" and it would repeat indefinitely until he woke up and turned it off.
YouTube Music simply doesn't work repeating over a speaker.
What's even more maddening: I can repeat a song indefinitely on the Android app, but once I cast to the Mini, THE OPTION TO LOOP IS CANCELLED AND DISAPPEARS.
The only solution: I had to make a playlist that plays the same song for hours.
From what I've read, it seems to me like this shift to YouTube Music is primarily a licensing issue. Rather than pay for streaming rights to music tracks, Google seems to be using the library of music it has on YouTube to retroactively backdoor a streaming service that plays the YouTube videos without the video.
I suspect the repeat restrictions are a side-effect of this, somehow.
I would switch to Spotify (and may still do so) but I'd still be held hostage to pay YouTube the same price to run without ads (the primary reason I bought the package in the first place), so my choice is to switch to Spotify and make my kids watch YouTube ads, or pay double.
My biggest complaint is that discovering new music on youtube music is basically non-existent. I could pick a station on google music and find new songs I like within 3 songs. Youtube music, even on a "curated" list seems to always play the same 20-ish songs over and over again.
I'm guessing this also has something to do with the licensing.
This sounds really strange to me. I've never used Youtube music, but I've discovered much more music I like listening to normal Youtube with autoplay than with Spotify.
Re: Licensing Issue: I saw a list recently of the royalty rates different online music sites pay. Google Music was paying the highest rate, by far. So that is probably part of it.
> Google seems to be using the library of music it has on YouTube to retroactively backdoor a streaming service that plays the YouTube videos without the video.
This is almost certainly not true. The on demand music available for YouTube Music was not previously available and all of it appears to be "auto-generated by YouTube" according to the description (eg: the audio for Thriller was only recently uploaded/auto-generated in 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z85lxckrtzg). All of that music was likely licensed in the same way it was GPM and for any other DSP.
For a lot of the official content, yeah, that sounds right. But for the "unofficial" content? Absolutely, they were already arguably the largest music streaming sure to begin with, do they back fitted themselves into a proper streaming service.
I saw the writing on the wall years ago. There was just no way execs wouldn't leverage such an obvious opportunity.
I think the choice to merge Google Play Music into YouTube makes perfect sense. When you have the largest music streaming service (probably YouTube) why would you want to run another one.
I love the idea that anyone can easily publish songs that I can listen to (no need for music labels) and that I can share playlists that friends can add arbitrary YouTube songs to without a subscription.
The major issue is that they did a terrible job at it. To list a couple of issues:
- Your uploaded music and the YouTube collection are completely separate (unlike GPM)
- It buffers almost nothing ahead, even in bad network conditions so it fails on road trips.
- The song suggestions are awful. (way worse than GPM)
- Even if you dislike a song it will still suggest it for you (often frequently)
- A lot of features missing (sure, they wouldn't get them all, but so many are gone).
The list goes on. I was a GPM subscriber for a long time. I used to work at Google so I decided I would help beta-test YouTube Music. However it quickly became clear that it wasn't going to be a good replacement for GPM. I ended up switching away from YouTube Premium and YouTube Music.
Sorry TC the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format. Google killed the service because no one really uses it and it didn’t make sense to keep staffing it. But more so than that no one at google wants to work on a product no one uses. You won’t get promoted that way.
I expect you weren't intending to but you captured the essence of Google and the authors lament so succinctly. When I read your comment what I see is this:
"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.
> Google doesn't care about you or what you think.
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?
Why is it fascinating if it's not a false dichotomy? Google is not a startup. It's like saying that you're puzzled because companies operating from a garage are not held to the same standards than a fortune 500.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
It’s bad business if users won’t buy in future because you get a reputation for axing products, and/or you never apply yourself well to any one thing.
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.
Your comment about Stadia gave me this thought. What odds would I be willing to bet that Stadia would be around in 5 years. I wouldn't take a even money bet. Maybe 5:1 that they'd still be functioning in 2025?
It's an interesting question, I think i'd give it less than 10% but above 1%. It's outside their core competency, it involves them negotiating with rightsholders, and there's a bunch of competition coming from existing companies in the space (e.g. Microsoft, NVidia, etc.).
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.
"Is Cole Haan narcissistic for not offering me the shoe I want?"
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.
>"Is Cole Haan narcissistic for not offering me the shoe I want?"
>Yes. Absolutely.
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.
Your industry experience aside, are you asking why a ~2500 person company can't magically copy the latest tactic of a ~15000 company for just one of its product types? Are you asking why one niche of a clothing brand doesn't just do what the prime source for one of the most popular clothing items of all time does?
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.
I dislike when a company throws away a user's data. It's not great for a startup, but at least there's the excuse that they ran out of money or whatever. Google doesn't even have that reason. They deleted our data when they 100% had the option not to.
I'll admit, I don't work in the startup space. However, it seems to me that Google doesn't really run their products like a startup generally does. It seems like adapting your product to your existing client base is usually better than launching a similar but different product while your current one is live. Once you've fragmented your user base then shuttering one of your products and (hoping?) that the users who didn't migrate will finally migrate to your new product... that seems like a lot of unnecessary risk? Or maybe that's just the startup game?
I feel like if startups ran their business like google runs their products, they'd fail pretty quickly. Am I off base here?
Is this true or is it what Googlers who work on the low priority products that will inevitably be killed off after a few years tell themselves to feel better about working on what is essentially shovelware clones of the latest idea someone else is having some success with?
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.
I suspect this is just fatigue of seeing Google involved in yet another story along these lines. It has the emotional brand baggage of dozens of cancelled and pivoted products - of which a single user could have experienced many.
This is known as 'The Innovators Dilemma' and there is a book by the same name by Clayton Christensen[1].
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.
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.
It might be good business if it weren't Google. Have you used Youtube Music, their replacement service?
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.
I ended up switching to Apple Music. I know, I know, Apple, but like Google Music, they allow me to upload any music I have MP3s of. That includes all the tracks I bought from bands I love (usually through bandcamp, or ripped CDs) who aren't on streaming services yet.
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.
Just looked up Apple music myself and I'm surprised its available on Android. I might consider switching, I love being able to upload my mp3's, but YouTube Music has some crappy bugs, like choosing low quality YouTube versions of music, and always having the manually turn on shuffle for a playlist every time I drive my car.
This one of the reasons I never use more of Google than that I need out of job necessity. Every single product is up for termination or reduction in functionality whenever they feel like it. I really don’t like the monopoly position as a browser either, they’re are already close to being IE6, part 2. I would not be against breaking up Google.
As someone who hasn't done web development for a long time and then tried it again recently — no, the one close to being IE6 is Safari. It took them 5 whole years to add support for webp. It's the reason why I still have to serve jpegs from my website. They take some nonsense amount of time to implement APIs that Chromium and Firefox had for years, too, like WAAPI. And you don't have the option to not support Safari either, because that's the only browser on iOS.
...Except, isn't that exactly the point of having competing browsers? WebP was pushed heavily by Google and because google has such a massive market share, it became a 'standard.' Google has been leveraging its position as the dominant market leader in the browser market to push its technologies and forcing competing browsers to support it or receive reduced functionality. It's the same story for 4k video on youtube.
WebP simply offers more effective compression than the ages-old jpeg. That's it. Apple has its own HEIC as a competing format, but that didn't really take off.
...which one might attribute to the fact that it's not supported on chrome, the vastly more popular web browser. I really don't see how you can argue that Safari is the new IE6 when it is slow to adopt standards that Google just decided are now web standards.
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.
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.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Products get resources allocated to them based on how commercially important they are. That’s not narcissism it’s business.
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.
I used Google Music for streaming music ever since it became available in our country. I remember the first thing I did was to back up all my mp3s, but after that I used to stream many other songs and that worked just fine. I found everything that I was interested in on there.
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.
An issue with this approach is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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.
"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."
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?
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 is exactly what happened when they (google) pushed "Google Chronicle" a security offering- which my employer might use (having some GCP and a lot of Gsuite)- I wouldn't even suggest it to the CISO, based on the nearly 99.9% chance Google will kill it and we would be left with a huge gap.
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.
> They specifically mentioned that except for a niche subset of users most people don't store MP3s in their phones to listen to.
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.
A tip you might want to consider if the storage on phones becomes a non-issue for you: ditch the standalone MP3 player with the nice DAC, and just get a high-quality Bluetooth DAC like the Fiio BTR3 (which honestly sounds just as good as my home stereo) that you can pair with your 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.
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.
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.
>"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."
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.
Is that narcissism..? Or is that just totally reasonable project and time management? Google has limited resources. Why is it their responsibility to continue staffing projects that people aren't using?
>It captures the narcissism that is tech perfectly.
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.
One of the ways in which narcissism is expressed is in a lack of empathy for others. The economic priorities of "big problems" or "small problems" doesn't enter the picture once a product is shipped.
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 get your point about empathy, but it's far too utopian IMO. This isn't like life saving heart medication or something, its just music streaming. A company is not obligated to provide a service forever, even if they did kill off the competition. There also has to be a reasonable balance between: "users want this" and "it's cost effective to maintain." Having empathy does not obligate someone to charity. On that note, if there is truly a market for the service, rather than few angry niche customers, then someone else will come along to fill the void.
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.
> 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.
That's a catch-22. You have to be pretty big to be able to license this stuff at all.
I’d love to work on a maintenance project for a product I care about, though - and add small little incremental improvements over time and make my mark that way.
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 large majority of enterpise projects are maintenance, if you want to see a career die quickly focus on being an expert in technology fad X.
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.
Many of us would be perfectly happy spending our entire career making hundreds of thousands of dollars working on a niche product that we are passionate about.
> Wanna see your career die quickly? Move to a maintenance project.
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.
How is it narcissism? It's pragmatism! A company isn't going to work on something that a minority of people care about out of the goodness of their heart. Why would you expect that of them?
The problem is that Google’s infrastructure makes it damn near impossible to spin off products to people who would be more than happy to run a 10 million dollar company.
If in fact it is viable, then it's a good idea to work on it. Seems like a big "if". Regardless, it's a different argument to the nonsensical one gp was making.
Of course they do, everyone wants to get on the recurring payments hype train. Besides, recurring payments make charts go up more reliably, and charts going up is the most important thing in the modern IT apparently, common sense be damned.
With the neglect of the product, it's no wonder it was "dying" (I haven't seen metrics to back up that claim, though I haven't looked, either). I used it quite extensively for the past five years, and hardly anything changed—even the curated "stations" of themed music seemed frozen in time. I don't see why it couldn't have been the next Spotify if they hadn't invested in it, and the new YouTube streaming platform seems like a shoddy attempt at synergizing disparate brands.
I'm assuming Spotify ate their lunch, just like IMO why Apple Music sucks too. Better selection, discovery, ui etc so the userbase just isn't there for Google or Apple and is either dying or flat and humming along and possibly costing as much to operator or more than it is taking in. Ripe for getting the axe.
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.
I still buy CDs; my primary sources of new music are Bandcamp and CDs. Books in print or DRM-free ebook; and I buy BluRay and DVD movies, too.
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.
It's worth noting that as much as we say CDs are "dead," the new Xbox and Playstation can still play CDs and DVDs, and Bluray drives for computers are still being made.
I bought a USB3 drive bay enclosure just so I could put a BluRay burner into it and use it on any machine with USB3. Super-handy; I can point MakeMKV at a recent purchase and within an hour or two have a bluray rip ready to play wherever I wish.
Oh, and if it's local, search is instant, playback is instant, internet connectivity does not matter, no surprice updates, it just works. My player is Winamp and it still works just fine after all these years.
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).
For real, was just discussing this earlier today. Rumours is a masterpiece and all the later remasters are worse and worse. When you stream it, it's remaster roulette.
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 used to keep a lot of movies on a HD, most that I'd ripped myself from legally acquired DVDs. At a certain point I decided to write a list of those movies, shove it in a document on Dropbox and delete the files, freeing up about 2TB.
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.
Nico’s solo work spawned a range of goth music from Siouxsie and the Banshees to Sisters of Mercy. Still heard in acts like Chelsea Wolfe and ADULt. No doubt it’s dour and atonal but it was distinctive.
Music is tightly coupled with culture and culture is coupled with the tech. When something vanishes, most of the time it is because no one cares about it anymore because everyone moved on to the next thing. Some people remain of course, they get lonelier in this quest and if it happens that they have some artistic abilities they can play part in the re-discovery of the brilliance of the art of that era in the next retro wave.
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.
Which is exactly the same as no one cares as it's cultural prime-time passes. There's not much money in serving the stuff that no one wants anymore, thus no profit, which leads to license termination.
It's not banned, simply it's out of stock. The same as not being able to find Nirvana CD's because kids moved on listening to Eminem on Winamp by downloading mp3 on eMule.
And "It really whips the Llama's ass" means nothing to the kids these days.
It's not just out of stock, it's unavailable. I can buy long out of print books from a used book store; I cannot buy delisted and vaulted digital content.
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.
The few who care will make a copy, you can make your own copy or take it from those who do. No DRM is stopping you from taking pictures or make recordings.
Even if ıt was the case that vanishes from the surface of earth, it's not that different from last physical copy getting scratched.
Not at all, CD's also vanish exactly the same way. At some point it is no longer profitable to print those, no longer profitable to keep those in the shelves, no longer profitable to have them in the storage and they vanish.
Those who have them begin using them as frisbees, decoration or simply trash them.
Cultural prime-time doesn't mean beach music top list. There are many subcultures and they have their own prime-time music that people outside of that group never heard of.
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.
"When something vanishes, most of the time it is because no one cares about it anymore"
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".
I think I fall squarely into that category with a music library clocking in at about 49GiB. And I really get the convenience of streaming over having to manually sync files with your devices, which is also why I've been mirrorring my collection with a Subsonic instance on my VPS for years, which means that I can stream my music from anywhere.
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 thinking about working on a product that lets you stream your own music via webrtc sever from behind your own isp. Think this is something that might have a market?
Try Syncthing [1], it's what I use to sync my files, including my music collection (60 GB) to my phone. Works like a charm, it's free software and decentralized.
> the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format.
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.
Honestly, I think you inadvertedly prove the OP's point. Given that you used a piped command in the terminal to search your Linux distribution for mp3s, I'd say you're in fact one of the very Silicon-Valley types you mention.
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.
Being in 20s myself, I mostly only use terminal for everything? Why? It's efficient and faster. And of course, I don't use streaming or subscribing services. Not sure why people think only millennial do this. I personally think people just fall for marketing and tech hype too easily.
"Millenials" is a somewhat vague term. It's been used for everything from the XY-generation from the late 70's/early 80's, to Generation Y, to the people born after the year 2000.
It's usually better to talk about Generations X, XY, Y and Z rather than millenials because of that.
>Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with 1981 to 1996 a widely accepted defining range for the generation.
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.
I have to wonder if going through the experience of their favorite music (+book +movie +game etc) disappear on them online due to $(random reason outside their control) enough times will sour them by the time they're in their 30s?
Or will that generation grow with an acceptance that everything is ephemeral subject to the whim of corporate licensing? That seems a bit sad.
There's apparently already an entire generation who hasn't ever used a computer-like device that isn't locked down. I mean all those kids with iPads. They are simply unaware that there could be something better, something more empowering.
Back when oink.me.uk was a thing, I had amassed a (what I considered to be) massive collection of music. Tens of thousands of songs, 500gb hard drive entirely filled with music. It had everything and I downloaded every new thing that looked remotely interesting.
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.
If something that matters to me disappears from whatever service I use, I'll just download it after the fact. If I don't care enough to do that, it wasn't that important.
I know it's very spotty (pun not intended), it doesn't have some music I like and I wouldn't call my tastes particularly esoteric. However, for enough people in English-speaking countries it has enough even outside of pop that anything that's missing is a long-tail situation.
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.
I've cancelled my netflix account a few times; and I might be about to do it again.
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.
Renewing is automatic and without service interruption; cancelling involves a service interruption. I'll go months at a time without Netflix available in our house because there's nothing desirable to watch on it.
Disagree. No idea if it's there now or not, I haven't checked in years but they had no Alien Sex Fiend, Damned or Jesus and Mary Chain. Oh and no Soft Cell either although that might have been because of a song called Sex Dwarf. This was formative stuff for me and I still listen to it pretty regularly.
Maybe its because you haven't checked in years, because most of those artists you listed are there. I'm not sure about Damned, did you mean The Damned? If so, every artist you claimed as missing is available.
In my case, it's very few songs I like that are not on Spotify. I remember Neil Young going away and then going back on Spotify . I simply didn't listen to his songs for some time because while I like his art, it wasn't worth the effort to download his songs or subscribe to his expensive higher quality music streaming service.
Absolutely, and I don't pretend to believe that every single recording someone might want to listen to isn't covered by traditional music streaming services. However, it seems to me and many of my immediate peers like most people are pretty well serviced by services like Spotify. Even several of the musicians who comes in to play at a local pizzeria I frequent self publish on Spotify, and I'd probably only end up buying half of their CDs. ;)
Another anecdata point in your support: my search was for '*.flac' and the number was 3,318.
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.
Why is it such a weirdo thing? I don't want to bleed money every month just to listen to music. Or put up with ads. Owning mp3s is the most straightforward way to achieve that.
Owning thousands of mp3s is only really cheaper if you obtained them via pirating. CDs in the 90s and 00s (I haven't seen a CD in a store since then) retailed for $15 and would probably have around 10 songs. A 3000 song library would run you $4500. That's like 40 years of Spotify subscriptions.
Music subscriptions are dramatically cheaper than buying music. Unless you prefer to listen to the same songs for a long time, but that's not representative of most people nowadays.
I tried using Spotify, but after every song there was an advertisement. Is everyone actually paying for Spotify? Why would I want to do that when I could just listen to my mp3s for free?
Pretty much everyone I know pays. College students split the family plan so its $2.50/mo. Pretty good considering that would only get you two songs on iTunes.
I'm old-school. I pay so that I can download a whole album on to my phone and listen to it while I'm out walking and not worry about having a good Internet connection. I also hate ads so I'd pay to not have any.
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.
I'd think mostly for the radio-like experience: new music coming into rotation, deep cuts from classic albums, possibly a DJ, etc.
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.
Music discovery and a curated-by-not-yourself playlists are the two big things in my experience. The aim of the game is for spotify to play you music that you didn't realise you wanted to hear, and even better if it's from an artist you don't know.
so you don't have to buy or otherwise acquire the mp3s and then worry about storing them somewhere where you can access them from your phone. unless you have a small library that fits on the phone.
I'm in my (late) 20s and I have a big local collection of music, mp3 and lossless. I still occasionally torrent entire discographies. I pay for exactly zero subscriptions. Many people I know do the same. Some pay for Spotify since it recently became available. Some pay for Apple Music. Some are foolish enough to pay for VK music despite the ability to use ad blockers and modded apps.
In other words, it very much depends on the country.
I tried to head this point off by specifying English-speaking countries (and specifically I meant the anglosphere). I can totally see how spotify is far less of a value proposition outside of that.
An odd one out here myself (I don't listen to music), but as a young adult I use my 20 dollar mp3 player for most audio needs. Though I also do not own a smartphone, so for a mobile player I am forced to an mp3 player, I would still use the mp3 player if I had a smartphone since the disjoint is quite helpful here. Never used spotify before.
This is a fair call-out and I did anticipate it, but I couldn't think of any better examples to quantify what is definitely a feeling that spotify has ubiquity amongst the age bracket I discuss. It's no one thing, but a tonne of small examples that don't come to mind. That's why I ended up using that example even though I knew someone would call out the selection bias (that is real, don't get me wrong).
I get the feeling that age discrimination is the new "black & white". "Oh, you are born in this decade, so you must be doing X". Yeah, whatever. I'm doing X because I like to do it. I'm an "ageing millenial" per GPs definition (so with mid-30 I'm old?), yet I'm well aware of TikTok and such.
ehhhh that comparison is pretty weak. you get to choose how much you care about being "discriminated" against for your interests. you don't get to choose how racial discrimination impacts you.
While I agree with you that age discrimination exist at least in mild form, direct comparison with racial discrimination is excessive. In the extreme case, you won’t get shot by a cop for being old while arguably being black increases that probability.
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".
Don't forget about beautiful, messy apps like Airsonic that you host yourself. It's the best solution IMO. You can listen to your whole collection at the quality you want on basically every platform. A fork of pSub is what I use a primary CLI player for it, but the mobile apps are also great. You can cache music locally, so I like to queue up a few albums before I leave the house (not that I do that often nowadays) so I can listen to them while driving without using any precious mobile data.
I actually did read through that thread the other day. If I understood it correctly, it looks like it's in a state of transfer to community development.
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.
> She has written songs for other artists including Cher, Rihanna, the Backstreet Boys, Leona Lewis, Mylène Farmer, Céline Dion and Christina Aguilera.
> no one at google wants to work on a product no one uses
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.
Surely I can't be the only one who still have cars which do not stream music, and so I have to put MP3s on CDs and USB sticks. Also, my wireless earbuds have built-in storage, so I load a bunch of music onto it and work out without carrying my phone with me. I also have a bunch of DJ mixes which are not available on online streaming services. Finally, I load MP3s onto my phone when I fly so that I can listen to music on the plane and in foreign countries. For all those reasons, I still keep and curate a pile of MP3s.
Same, and I will do everything I can to never have my frikkin car connected to the Internet. I’d rather just put my whole music library onto an SD card and plug into my car stereo, or use a Bluetooth connection to my iPhone.
My 2011 Honda Fit is in a similar boat. I have no need or desire to deal with the hassle of replacing the integrated stereo system (god, I miss being able to just unclip the crappy stock tape deck and plug/slide in a slightly better one with a CD player), much less replace the car.
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.
Well, I upgraded my car with an aftermarket headunit, that is capable of Apple CarPlay. This + a Wifi/LTE-Stick, which opens a hotspot as soon as I start the car. While I preload mostly everything (sh*tty mobile, because germany), thanks to my phone being attached to my car, I can open a VPN tunnel to my music library at home. A really appreciate the "hackability" of older cars.
> I also have a bunch of DJ mixes which are not available on online streaming services.
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.
Interesting solution, do you have one? Doesn't transmitting through FM significantly degrade the audio quality? I can definitely hear the difference between FM radio music and music from the MP3 on the CDs.
Yeah, I have one. It's way better than FM quality from radio stations, but it's not full CD quality. It uses a higher frequency range than broadcasting stations and obviously it's much closer to the antenna, that's why the quality is higher.
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 was using it. I still want to own the shit I buy. I don't want to subscribe to a service just to rent shit. I know where subscribe cancer eventually goes.. To exclusives and to having to subscribe to tons of services just to get the shit you want. And of course you have to have a internet connection and what not. I just want to buy the music and have it on my device.
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.
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).
YouTube music is terrible. I have no idea who the target market is supposed to be. It mixes in the subset of YouTube that is music, but not all of it, and stripped of YouTube context such as comments.
Get you off my farm and leave me to sit in my rocking chair at 55, you young'un. Pfah, youth these days, when we was young we had to stream our bits over barbed wire fences through thunderstorms and solar flares, both ways. Oh, by the way:
The result of "Waste not, want not", i.e. save what you like for later, times might not always be good. I started doing this with a cassette recorder, finger passed over the Record button for when some song came on the radio (a box with electricals in it and a wire sticking out, you turned a knob and music came out, for free!) but graduated to the intertubes when they became a thing around 1993.
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.
Google Music uploaded & purchased songs are automatically transferred to YouTube Music. Google music is not really killed. It is just replaced by Youtube Music, which has has a much better interface and also includes all music videos from Youtube, a killer feature for me.
See https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9698084?hl=en
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.
It's true that Youtube Music is a replacement / rebranding for Google Music, but the "better interface" is certainly open for debate.
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 your father has somewhat fast, always-on internet you just build him a personal streamer box using a single-board computer (RPi etc) and an external drive. Put something like Airsonic on it and he can listen to his music, netcasts, audio books and internet radio stations anywhere he wants. Hook it up to his stereo - him being in his 70's he might still have one - and he can use it as a jukebox, playing through the speakers without having to fiddle with Bluetooth.
> Hook it up to his stereo - him being in his 70's he might still have one - and he can use it as a jukebox, playing through the speakers without having to fiddle with Bluetooth.
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 a number of them, strewn around the house, connected to USB DACs which are hooked up to the server. On that server I run mpd which is controlled through either ncmpc in a terminal session, MALP on mobile. The server also runs Airsonic since that is more efficient for remote streaming than mpd+icecast. No bleeps or bloops since the USB DACs are only used for audio streaming and also because they're on a server which doesn't produce any bleeps or bloops to begin with.
I personally moved to Apple Music with my music library. Allows uploading and then streaming your own songs, has a streaming subscription option and a store to purchase music, and works on the devices I use. And while iTunes on Windows may be clunkier than Spotify, it's a hell of a lot more usable - for my use cases anyway.
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.
The core of google is search. All their money is in search. Everything else is argued in service of search as a loss leader, such as Android which drives users to search but in itself costs a ton of money to maintain. If it didn’t drive users to search, it wouldn’t have value.
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.
Even with generous storage space, I can only justify keeping maybe one copy of the album in FLAC. And then it comes down to which version will I archive as FLAC: the original pressing? The recent remaster? The "collector's edition"? The ridiculously hard-to-find Japanese SACD pressing?
I believe you are correct that no one was using Google Play Music but I find it frustrating because in my experience it was the best streaming service. It's just Google being Google failed to figure out how or even try to market it.
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 don't understand the desire to be promoted. I work for a Fortune 100 company on a product that is very low on the totem pole. I've been working on it for nearly 20 years. The work is very stress free and they pay me way way more than I need, especially considering the cost of living where I live. I'd happily stay here until retirement. Getting promoted would suck.
If by aging millennials you mean people from 25 to 35 years of age then that is the often the largest and most sought after demographic for any product...
I do agree on the politics of googlers though: once released its ignored.
Google Music was crap service from the very start. It was clunky and heavy on all platforms, could not distinguish completely different artists from each other because they thought band names are unique and music range was poor compared to competition. When google launched GM, Deezer was already way better option.
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.
Just an FYI - Subsonic (and forks such as Airsonic) would fit your wish of streaming & caching your own music to any device. There's clients for every device you care to name, even (surprisingly enough) a functioning client for my old BlackBerry Q10, with it's excellent speakers :)
It is self-hosted, but that's more a question of desire than ability I'd imagine
> Sorry TC the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format.
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 :( ).
There will always be exceptions. OP was talking about the population at large, and it's important to think like that when you want to appeal to a large audience, like Google does. And I also think they are right about which age bracket is primarily hoarding mp3s in 2020; it's the ones that were young enough at the time to jump on to mp3s, but had enough time to build up a collection they would not want to lose. Of course, there will be other niches, such as audiophiles with flacs, or rare music collectors, etc, but compared to Joe Public, it's a drop in the ocean.
> keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format. Google killed the service because no one really uses it
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
Sad but true. A lot of great ideas at tech companies get thrown by the wayside because aspiring PMs and Eng leads don't think those project will get attention.
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.
I have a big music library (and am older than millennials). But, honestly, curating it better has been on my "someday" list to do for years. And I honestly doubt if I would have systematically created one from scratch if I didn't already own a big physical music library and streaming services were readily available.
I'm pretty glad they gave me the push. The new YouTube music app is utter junk, it's been replaced with Tidal and Jellyfin. Having a self hosted media library has been great so far. The only annoyance is my garbage Virgin media modem dropping offline every few days, cutting me off from my home server while I'm out and about.
I don't think your organizational analysis is congruent with reality. When Google announced their intention to roll Play Music into YT Music, there were several people working on both products, and they worked for years to merge them. If anything, rolling it over caused it to be even more staffed up than ever.
For me I tried the youtube music, found that it was heel bent on playing me videos I didn't want to watch and immediately switched to Amazon prime.
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.
I don't think many of those would have even used Google Music. And conventional streaming services are only viable, if they allow to convert content to portable formats in my opinion. Maybe just a preference, but in my experience still widespread.
Not even a millenial, and I still subscribe to Apple Music, even though I have an extensive ripped FLAC collection and there are maybe 2-3 CDs a year that come out that I will listen to more than once (which I buy anyway).
I'm still bitter about this. I understand why Google kills free services that don't make money or no one actually uses but I've been paying for this service since it was released. My YouTube music experience has been worse in almost every single way. If it wasn't for Ad-Free YouTube I would cancel my subscription immediately.
As a side note one of the nice benefits was the data wasn't applied to T-Mobile data usage, I don't think YouTube Music will be added to this service.
It's reasons like this and the Google Photo situation that make me shake my head when people say "You don't need an SD card slot on your phone when Google has all these awesome 'free' services."
The recent trend of service fragmentation and media appearing and disappearing from service to service has sent me back in time to protect my ownership - for the first time in a decade, I have an optical drive in my primary computer so that I can rip Blurays, my previous method of obtaining media to keep was to buy it on iTunes and use Tuneskit to strip the DRM, though that's been broken for nearly a year now after Apple cut off the fake AirPlay device method they used to get the raw video data.
Should DRM-free stores for music go the way of the dodo, I guess I'd have to buy physical media there too, or just go back to piracy
> my previous method of obtaining media to keep was to buy it on iTunes and use Tuneskit to strip the DRM, though that's been broken for nearly a year now
What?! No it's not. iTunes + Tuneskit M4V Converter is how I watch a majority of movies and TV shows.
Oh, huh! I never noticed, because I keep iTunes and Tuneskit isolated in their own Windows VM, and I'm using Apple's special 12.6.4 branch that supports managing iOS apps (but also doesn't get updates).
Same. Though I have a history of bad luck with SD cards even if I try buy decent ones, so I instead spend extra on a phone with enough space[1][2] and regularly rsync the phone's contents to my home server and external backups (keeping both current status and historic snapshots so nothing is ever lost). OK, I'm paying for those resources but I'd have them for other reasons anyway.
I do recognise though that this all marks me as not the "regular man on the street" in this context, so I'm outside the target audience for this sort of service from the likes of Google.
When Google's app stopped playing my local files, I just switched to another. Not the one Google wanted me to switch to, but I doubt they'll lose any more sleep over my absence (unless I'm part of a larger minority than I assume) than I'll lose over uninstalling their old app and not using the new one.
[1] I don't have a lot of music that I keep to hand on the device, the "lower priority" stuff I can stream from home when I have connectivity anyway, and clear large video recordings off fairly quickly
[2] Though my current phone does have an SD slot, and not one that is blocked (as with my previous phone) when using the second SIM
Good riddance. I started using it because of the ability to upload my existing collection. Any song that matches their catalog used their catalog instead. The problem was that when the song in their catalog was removed due to licensing reasons, I'd lose the song too. It would be gone from any playlists too. And Google won't notify about these removals (because of course that would make them look bad, it's better if the user just doesn't notice).
I'm not buying into any Google-managed service. Ever.
I thought the transition to youtube music was pretty painless. All my uploaded songs are still there. Also, some things that were not available on google music (too obscure?) are available on youtube, and by extension the youtube music app.
It was painless, but the UI for YouTube is awful. Album lists are slower to load, the integration with Google home is worse, and the app doesn't let you play music with your screen off.
And it doesn't prioritize the music I have uploaded so I regularly get garbage YouTube versions instead. Google music worked, YouTube music is horrible. I'm back to using an mp3 player of sorts. I bought a JellyPro, disabled all apps apart from a music player and added some automation via magisk to turn on airplane mode when it's not plugged in, and turn the device of after an hour "idle" (not playing music, not plugged in). Best damn mp3 player ever. I get wifi sync, album art download, tag editor, last.fm scrobbling (caches tracks while airplane mode is on) and with the modifications I made, crazy battery life (especially considering how poor the jelly Pro battery is)
These days a 200gb sdcard is dirt cheap, so I can fit my entire collection on it.
Thanks for reminding me about another. The desktop version forces you to play videos for songs you've uploaded unless you have a subscription. Waste of bandwidth.
... you can't listen to music you paid for without having the screen on?
Wow. Just wow.
Good job Google, you made something worse than a Walkman. A Walkman could clip on your belt and you didn't have to worry about jostling it or touching it wrong and so having it do something wrong.
30 years later and the tech industry builds something inferior and calls it better.
I almost never want or need a large library when I listen to music; I have an inclination to listen to an album or long DJ mix and that will be what I listen to for the next hour.
Moreover, you just compared the two and noticed a difference. They are comparable, and Youtube is inferior for listening to music you've paid for if you don't feel inclined to pay a subscription fee for the privilege of listening to it.
Google Music was an offline-capable service. It's valid to compare Youtube Music to offline services because paying users had the expectation it would work.
> Good job Google, you made something worse than a Walkman. A Walkman could clip on your belt and you didn't have to worry about jostling it or touching it wrong and so having it do something wrong.
Google Music was able to operate offline, and it didn't require your attention while playing.
A Walkman is offline and didn't require your attention while playing.
Youtube Music requires your attention while playing.
Not requiring your attention while playing is a critical, minimal feature of a mobile music device.
> It was painless, but the UI for YouTube is awful.
Yes, has anyone noticed that in dark mode shuffle button state is completely invisible for color-blind people? I'm most probably deuteranomal and I have no clue if shuffle is on or off :(
I even took a screenshot and the colors there are exactly the same, what is happening?
And the autogenerated playlists are static (so if you make a generated playlist from the same source on different days you'll get the same songs in the same order) and aren't infinite (so it'll eventually just repeat instead of continuing to find more to play or reshuffling existing songs), which really sucks.
The habit of youtube music to include individual songs and multi-hour mixes in the same playlist isn't exactly great, either.
I have found a couple of albums in YT Music where the songs are not listed in the real album order. It drives me nuts when I'm listening to an album and the songs play in the wrong order. Its also weird because the same albums had the correct order in Google Play Music.
have they added playlist folders yet? that's the main reason I ditched Google music and went back to Spotify. it was too clunky having a single list of playlists with no way to organise them. i have maybe 300 playlists now on Spotify and there's no way i could have managed that with Google music
you do realize that you could (have?) import all google music files to youtube music. Then you have a tab saying "own content" or so and all mp3s are still there and you could listen to them via yt music the same as you could before
It does not look like you can edit your uploads unlike with Play Music. Admittedly that's very probably a feature used by few people (although I know that for all of the people that use it, it is because of some very obscure track they are very attached to and can only listen to if they upload it, making it a must have feature).
And more generally, while I don't necessarily mind a rebrand (although I have to admit that this being Google, I have my suspicions that this will be handled the same way they handle all their messaging services) and I can be forgiving for a v1, this is still so far below play music that I don't really see myself using it.
@geek_at: unless I'm mistaken, you can't listen if your screen is off or without ads unless you pay for a yt music subscription. I paid to purchase music on Google Music and now I am being forced to pay a monthly fee to access the content ad free.
I like Youtube Music more. It has a wider selection and better suggestion algorithms, especially in the latest update. I think the interface is better and more modern. There may be niche features it doesn't have yet, but they are improving it rapidly.
Their suggestion algorithms are possibly the worst my wife and I have ever experienced. I don't know how people can use it unless they like top40 getting jammed into anything and everything. If thats your thing then its probably great. But thats not so much an algorithm as much as its a list. Anybody can randomly drop top40 into your playlists.
After Goog killed Play Music I switched over to Spotify and I've been astonished at how much better the recommendation algorithm is
Youtube music's recommendation algorithm is perplexingly bad. No matter what seed I start a playlist with, it always ends up at Ra Ra Rasputin after 20 or 30 songs. I don't know if other people have this problem but it's really annoying
If it's based on YouTube's algorithms, I'm not surprised. No matter what topic of video I start watching, after letting it autoplay for a while it ends up on conspiracy theory junk, which I have never intentionally watched.
Seems to push you towards what has high engagement regardless of whether that aligns with your history/interests at all.
That's not my experience at all, in fact I've found tons of small artists. Now that there are four discovery mixes per subsection, that ability is getting much better.
Where did they expand the selection? I thought everything on youtube was already in google music. I found a lot of things I used to stream from google music missing from youtube, but I've since gotten off entirely, so I haven't followed any recent updates.
If you've bought albums or tracks from Google Play Music, it lets you download them as mp3. I wonder if that option will now be removed. In that case, this would be the time to download and backup all your purchased music.
Maybe it's better to do it on a proper computer too, since Google says "Signing out of your account will remove downloaded music from your device.", although that might only apply to subscription tracks on mobile - I don't think it's completely clear. Ref: https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1250232?hl...
I've come to a point where the Google brand has such a strong association with "ephemeral" that, if Gmail had been launched today, I would probably not even bother getting an account.
As much as I resent Google for shuttering some fine services, I do not complain this move. It's natural to merge video and music at some stage. With just a single subscription, I get access to YouTube premium and YouTube music along with YT originals. YT music app can use some UI work, but apart from that it's a sweet deal.
Actually, I'd reckon the majority of traffic for music videos is for listening purposes, and not for actual viewing of the video.
YouTube is the best free platform for listening to music, with (probably) the largest collection of songs, if you can survive with lower quality/bitrate music.
Microsoft Groove (Xbox Music/Zune) essentially had this same feature. Technically, they still do - they killed off the music streaming service, but you can still upload music to your OneDrive and listen to it from any device.
Mine is this: I have tracks that aren't available on any streaming service. I've also been buying music on CD since 1993, and online for 10+ years and have over 120k tracks which will never "become unavailable". My playlists will never disappear. I'll never pay another cent for them this music for the rest of my life. The money you pay to rent music each month, I use to buy another 2 albums and a bunch of tracks, so my collection constantly grows in the direction I want it to.
Bandcamp makes much more sense to me. Listen to music online as often as you want for free (without easy custom playlists that I know of, although they make some playlists and it is easy to play a bunch of music from particular publishers) and purchase if you want to add it to your collection (flac format) or support artists.
I used to have a huge selection of MP3s with obscure and non-obscure music of my tastes that I've painfully curated over the years and I listened using an MPD server.
I'm glad I decided to keep the collection behind when I changed computers because Spotify is so much more convenient. I don't have to worry about downloading music or having the right device connected to the right server, and I've found more obscure tracks that I liked in 3 years of Spotify recommendations than in a decade of randomly going through the Internet.
google music being shut down and youtube music being a terrible replacement was enough to push me to set up my own plex - loving it so far. I run it off a raspi.
Plex is fantastic except the direction they seem to be going with how they monetize is questionable. Streaming from private servers is definitely The Way though, in any case
I'm now on Apple Music, after a year or so of being very unhappy using Spotify. It does the streaming big catalogue of music + upload your own and stream it too that I need. I love the ease of paying for a service and streaming any music I want but there's a bunch of stuff I own from bandcamp or cds which aren't on any streaming provider and I want them to be a part of my library too. Google Music did it well for me for a long time; Apple Music is doing it alright enough for me now. Apple Music in iTunes is absolute garbage on both mac and windows, but the android app works well.
I do a lot of driving in areas with poor to no mobile phone reception. Driving back from Wilpena Pound recently, google play music stopped working, no voice control for the drive home. Okay, can deal with that. However, I'm still yet to find a replacement that will work for me. I have yt music a shot, half an hour later I still couldn't get a single correct song to play. Google's advances are rapidly pushing me away from using Google products, or even taking higher advantage of ones I already use.
As with anything Google, is it really generosity when you become part of their botnet? Seems they got what they needed from the userbase information-wise and packed-house.
When I purged Google from my life a few years ago, this was one of the harder things to find a replacement for. I ended up finding Tunebox: http://toolsandtoys.net/tunebox-for-ios/
I already had my music collection backed up to Dropbox, and this iOS app just wraps a music player around it. The screenshots do look really old on the website - I'm not sure it's actually still maintained - but it works fine (and despite the screenshots it does match the modern iOS look and feel).
Nothing will probably ever be as good for this usecase as the Google Music experience, but Tunebox gets the job done.
Edit: I didn't realize Plex had a music offering. I may have to check that out.
GPM was great, but I found it was really only useful when I was working under constraints of Google's own making, e.g. when I was on:
1) A Chromebook
2) An Android phone/tablet that had limited storage and did not have an expandable memory.
So yeah, GPM was invaluable during the period from 2013-2017 or so when my main stack was a Chromebook Pixel/HTC One M7/Nexus 7. But now my main laptop runs Linux, and my Android phone/tablet both have SD slots, so it's much easier to me just to pop in a 128GB SD card into both and opt for local storage.
I guess if I ever switch to Pixel phones again, the loss of SD slot might be a problem, so again, it's sort of a Google fix to a problem Google caused in the first place...
Google's contact has been utterly disappointing so far.
They kept saying for months that they will port all missing features from Google Play Music to Youtube Music and they kept advertising that you can transfer everything over.
Guess what, they haven't transferred a single feature over and no, you cannot transfer everything over.
I'm still staying with YT Music because they have the second best recommendation engine —Google Play Music had the best by far.
I did buy subscriptions to both Deezer and Spotify (and a 3rd party service to sync my collection over) to test, but their recommendations / radio features are way worse.
I originally signed up to google music because it was the only music service that played well with steam's browser so I could listen to tunes while DMing in CS:GO. I didn't want to run browsers or any other programs because of the potential for frame drops. Youtube music works alright, but hopefully they continue to improve the terrible interface and ideally have the ability to play the audio track only of songs. I don't like the videos running while listening to random remixes/mashups that only youtube has since it will cause frame drops.
This seems like the place to ask if anyone has a good approach to downloading your music library. I've now got a large collection of DCI shows locked away in youtube music.
Google takeout has some options. I've downloaded my Google Music collection by manually and laboriously clicking through the large list of zips it provided. I think there are better ways (which I haven't tried yet) where you get it to export to Google Drive, and use some kind of local Drive syncing program to download.
Audiogalaxy .. Wow i miss that site. Im not sure why there was the need for the. "Satellite" downloader .. But man i loved AG before it went stream and then buh bye
I owned an Audiogalaxy shirt that was basically my favorite shirt in high school and I wore it until it was threadbare. Audiogalaxy was just such a neat way to steal music.
I tried youtube music and I really enjoyed it. With a particular taste for music, it amazed me when the app made a off line playlist of possible songs I'd like, and I did like some of them.
My problem with youtube/music is how they are forcing a subscription service to us by giving us a beating with unskippable ads and all sorts of intrusive ads.
Even Google music had what I thought already was a trap button to subscribe to youtube music.
Google killing off Play Music was the final straw for me finally going about de-Googling my life. Not even for privacy reasons or anything, I just hate the feeling of these great services that I use being killed or left to languish for absolutely no reason.
How am I supposed to trust Android or Gmail when all my other favorite Google products have been killed off for no reason
Google would appear to be killing unlimited storage across their product range. It's gone from GSuite/Workspaces. It's gone from Photos. And now it's gone from Music.
If there are any Google products left that allow unlimited data, then that feature is going to disappear.
And they've just announced[0] that any Google Docs count towards your storage in Workspaces. So as well as removing unlimited storage, they've eliminated these 'zero-cost' file types.
Mine is still working right now to stream music, not local or downloaded. Some day it won't and I'll need to jump services because YTM is still hot garbage compared to an app that did all the things I wanted and got my $10 a month since late 2013 or so.
If I want to buy a mainstream pop song for a couple bucks and download an mp3, what website should I go to now? Amazon Music, I guess? iTunes works but requires a client, and as far as I can tell Youtube Music doesn't have downloading anymore...
If anyone else has a Google Music account, but doesn't want to move to YouTube Music, then try chatting with Google support and asking for a refund. It worked for me!
Is there a self hosted app that you can slap on the VPS along with you music collection to replicate GM? Seems like a rather trivial thing to implement.
What I find deeply ironic is Google Music effectively monetized "pirate" music.
Take those huge MP3 libraries and play them back with ads (or subscriptions) and you can pay artists based on normal Streaming economics. Hell, it meant you could double sell to a customer (again, ads or subscription) if they bought a CD legally and uploaded it.
This would be a huge opportunity if not for the stupidity of the RIAA.
I uploaded my pirated MP3 library to Google Music, and I've never gotten an ad while listening to it, without a premium subscription. Same still applies to Youtube Music.
Google Music wasn't that good honestly. The only feature that really separated it from others was letting you upload your music. They basically ceased development on it 2 years ago and stopped adding any new functionality.
I don't disagree that it stagnated, but what kept me on it was the ability to seamlessly blend my own library with GPM's. Now that I've had to switch to Spotify I need to use a separate app for my own library and I hate it.
Correct, end of the day you basically have google music if you have plex plus tidal integration. Except now you can do lossless streaming which isn't something google music, youtube music, spotify, (most things) can do. But you can still transcode when using LTE if you want to keep the bandwidth down. Its up to you... bit rate, codec, etc. You're not just stuck with pre-selected lossy formats like mp3 or vorbis. You can use OPUS for example.
Google acquired Songza and integrated their playlists into the Play Music product. I think the Songza stuff is pretty good. I also think Play Music's "radio" feature is really good. When you start playing from a playlist it uses that a vector input, trying to find songs related to the whole playlist, instead of just related to one song, album, artist, or other scalar inputs.
I like YouTube for finding new music, and the chance of finding concerts that I attended with a hundred other people 15 years ago. The rest of the time I like listening to entire albums at a time. It was nice to get both with one subscription. Also, though it isn't relevant in 2020, Google Play Music had a better listing of upcoming nearby performances than I was aware of anywhere else.
The switch to YouTube Music has been terrible.
Dead simple things don't work: my son would listen to a specific white noise track at night over his Google Home Mini.
Previously, we could tell it to play the song, then say "repeat on" and it would repeat indefinitely until he woke up and turned it off.
YouTube Music simply doesn't work repeating over a speaker.
What's even more maddening: I can repeat a song indefinitely on the Android app, but once I cast to the Mini, THE OPTION TO LOOP IS CANCELLED AND DISAPPEARS.
The only solution: I had to make a playlist that plays the same song for hours.
From what I've read, it seems to me like this shift to YouTube Music is primarily a licensing issue. Rather than pay for streaming rights to music tracks, Google seems to be using the library of music it has on YouTube to retroactively backdoor a streaming service that plays the YouTube videos without the video.
I suspect the repeat restrictions are a side-effect of this, somehow.
I would switch to Spotify (and may still do so) but I'd still be held hostage to pay YouTube the same price to run without ads (the primary reason I bought the package in the first place), so my choice is to switch to Spotify and make my kids watch YouTube ads, or pay double.
RIP Google Music indeed