Sadly it’s my understanding that they plan to shut down google play music completely in favor of YouTube music at some point this year (at least according to a friend-of-a-friend who works on it). It’s already quite buggy and frustrating, but I still use it mainly because I am on the grandfathered $8/month plan and also get ad-free YouTube included.
That being said I went through my Google Play billing recently and realized I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on Google Play Music over the years. I don’t think I’ve listened to that much money’s worth of music considering the songs are about a dollar each to buy and I don’t add that many new songs every year.
Someone should build a tool that scans your streaming library on Google Play Music/Apple Music/Spotify or whatever and adds all of those tracks to an Amazon MP3 shopping cart to help you transition off the recurring service. I wouldn’t be surprised if something exists that does something similar using torrents.
It's unfortunate they're phasing out of google play music and putting everyone on the Youtube Music app. I had to transfer all my music to it the other day. I still pay $9.99 for everything though and get to watch youtube ad free so I don't really mind but it's a bit of a bummer.
I've enjoyed my Google music subscription for years as well, but I think it's pretty shady that lately they keep trying to bundle in a free YouTube subscription.
I still buy movies, and I have a fair bit of purchased music from before the subscription, so I'll be more than annoyed if I end up with my media library sitting in YouTube Red if they try to converge the products. Spotify would be high on a short list of alternatives if that happens.
"We’re gradually going to shut down Google Play Music, the Music Store on Google Play and Music Manager soon, with everyone losing access in the months to come. You can read our full announcement here. This announcement follows the launch of our new migration process (back in May) which lets all Google Play Music listeners easily transfer their data and make the simple switch to YouTube Music"
Interestingly, no mention of the new requirement to pay $9.99 pm to listen to your own music in the background, or the fact that ads will play on previously purchased tracks without becoming a premium subscriber.
For the last 6 years or so I -- foolishly it turns out -- chose to make Play Music my primary music platform. I was uncomfortable with subscribing to a music service and wanted to be able to keep my own library since the collection of music I own is a form of self expression for me. Google Play Music let me put my library in the cloud and listen to it on any device.
Now it's looking like I will probably lose a big chunk of it when Google Play Music gets replaced with YouTube Music since Google doesn't really let you download everything you've uploaded. I'm upset enough by this I am motivated to find a way to move away from other Google products to the extent that it is practical to do so.
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 had YouTube Family at $15/month until this month, when they raised the price to $23. I signed up back when Google Play Music was still a thing.
I was never able to get into YouTube Music, though, so I don't actually use it to stream my music. The fact that my playlists are shared between YouTube and YouTube Music is enough for me to drop it from serious consideration as a music streaming service on its own. That, plus the lack of lossless streaming, inconsistent, clunky UI, and lack of any positive features that distinguish it from Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, is why I never used it for anything other than sharing songs with people who didn't use Tidal.
That they apparently also include ads in the albums I transferred from Google Play Music - albums that I paid for - is just added insult.
The main way I justified paying the subscription was that other people in my household got access to ad-free music streaming (and they actually used it, unlike me), Youtubers get comped more from me watching their videos, and I didn't have to worry about whole-home adblockers to remove ads from the app. But after a 50% price hike that takes it above the prices for Tidal Family ($15), Apple Music Family ($17), and Spotify Family ($16), it's not something I can justify anymore.
(Youtube Music Family is $15, FWIW, but it doesn't include Youtube itself.)
Honestly I wasn't aware that Google Play Music was still around until I got an email telling me it would discontinued. I've been using YouTube Music since I signed up for YouTube Premium a few years ago, and I've been pretty happy with it.
I was a Google play music user for the entire life of the service. Lots of playlists, play history, ratings, etc. All of that is gone now. I tried multiple different apps to convert my playlists and library to Apple Music and even the official conversion to YouTube music but they all messed up my library and filled up with songs with similar names that are completely different genres and artists. Some music didn’t carry over at all and I have a vague sense that my playlists are not complete but no idea what’s missing. And while I liked the user interface of Google play music, I hate the interface of YouTube music and I’m not a fan of the interface of Apple Music. I lost control over how I play my music. I regret jumping on the streaming music bandwagon a decade ago.
Google plans to introduce a music subscription service soon, and it might be tied to Youtube. If they are doing anything similar to this, they will probably find a way to shut it down. I hope they don't though.
YouTube music sucks. Now that google play music is canceled. I either continue paying for yt red and stick with the worse music platform. I switch to prime music. Or I ditch yt and google music all together and use Spotify.
I still don’t get why google deprecated me as a customer. Google’s churn is exhausting. Starting to want the “Microsoft” & “Apple” experience of it just works.
Embrace the rant. While I've made effort to reduce my usage of other Google products for privacy reasons, Google Play Music is literally the last Google service that I haven't removed since the alternative are not much better.
If you don't need the upload features are OK with the same level of privacy issues associated with streaming services, I'd have to image Spotify is the next best thing with Apple Music (really?) a close third.
However, the lost of GPM will most likely make me reconsider using streaming services completely. There seems to be a few options for self hosting a 'streaming' music platform. Just browsing F-droid (FOSS Android store), there are clients for connecting to Subsonic [1] servers which seem target for this use case. I'm not sure how it compares to the popular Plex software [2] (which I actually think is bloated & overkill but I guess it would also work).
A few other apps (personally I use my phone 90% of the time I'm listening to music so having a Android app is essential at least until I can migrate to a Pinephone).
1. MPDroid - says it can stream from a MPD instance which sounds very cool.
2. AMPlayer (outdated but might lead somewhere) - connects to an Ampcache instance which integrates with nextcloud/owncloud. This sounds pretty cool.
There are of course apps that will scrape music from YouTube but I have low expectations.
The easiest, laziest way to remove google from your life is too simply stop using services as they shut them down. Instead of transferring from play music to YouTube music (play music is shutting down sometime after October, according to an email I got yesterday), I'm looking at setting up funkwhale or some other self-hosted music service (maybe just nextcloud? Not sure yet).
I am currently a paying customer of Google Play Music. It has its limitations and concerns:
- Missing certain artists altogether
- Missing certain albums from specific artists
- Quality of the music is not the best
- Owned by google
I would like to support a music streaming service that:
- Is ethical - actually pays royalties to artists
- Has a sound business model and is not being propped up by VC money and bleeding money continuously. I don't want to support the new status quo, which is actually worse than before streaming.
- Quality of music is at least CD-quality/FLAC.
- Music catalog meets requirements for a person who listens to a mixture of music, including some more obscure genres and artists.
- Is not going to disrespect my privacy by using the app as a data mining opportunity, above and beyond what is required to offer the service. I was considering Amazon Unlimited, but I really don't trust Amazon and Alexa at all.
I realise that there are not many services that meet all of these needs. Hell, I still have a lot of CDs/vinyl records at home. I don't want to go down the route of ripping all of them and hosting them on my own cloud (eg NextCloud). That is a lot of overhead. Paying for a streaming service is also paying for convenience at the end of the day.
I was a google play music user since its inception and I switched to spotify. I paid 10$ for a tool to port over all my playlists, some which had over 800 songs. It was about 95% accurate so I'm a happy camper. Spotify's bread and butter is their music player so they're not going to cancel it anytime soon. lol
That being said I went through my Google Play billing recently and realized I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on Google Play Music over the years. I don’t think I’ve listened to that much money’s worth of music considering the songs are about a dollar each to buy and I don’t add that many new songs every year.
Someone should build a tool that scans your streaming library on Google Play Music/Apple Music/Spotify or whatever and adds all of those tracks to an Amazon MP3 shopping cart to help you transition off the recurring service. I wouldn’t be surprised if something exists that does something similar using torrents.
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