I’m cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It’s funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway… there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn’t a thing.
Google music killed songza, I’ll never forgive them.
I loved Songza. 😭 To this day, I’ve not been equally happy with any other offering out there.
I was a big fan of GrooveShark. I thought they could have transitioned to the paid system, but weren’t able to.
Grooveshark was so cool! But I don’t think anything could’ve saved them, it was full of pirated music available for everyone.
When google music was consolidated into YouTube music it was a slightly worse experience, but mostly it somehow just ruined all of my playlists and made them unusable both on music and YouTube.
From what I can tell, the core issue with YouTube music is that it is restricted to the same API end points as default YouTube. Their api for playlist management just sucks and a lot of client side caching and workarounds are required to make it at all feel okay to use.
True random is hidden. They auto play videos and/or rape my data with downloads when I specifically tell it not to.
Slightly? I hated it and switched to Spotify
I couldn’t justify the cost of Spotify when I’m still paying for YouTube premium (and have no plans to quit) and at the end of the day it still isn’t GPM
Me too. I would’ve probably used Google Play Music to the end of my days but the transition to Youtube Music was so good awful I cancelled and switched to Spotify within a couple of days.
I’ll die on the hill that GPM was and still is the best music service I ever used. I don’t think I ever had a single recommendation that wasn’t on point for me. The service worked flawless and the app was easy to use. When we got the notice our hearts sank. Spotify doesn’t even compare .
Good call, recommendations have only gotten worse with subsequent iterations. I am glad they added gapless playback though, the first few versions had a tiny pause between songs which was hella obvious on stuff like Pink Floyd.
Plex Amp?
Same! I still keep the icon on my phone to remind me of what we lost.
Oh yes, the enshittification of music streaming.
To be fair, most people seem to be fine with a “broadcast radio” type playback, where they want to hear both the music they already know/like, with other music that is at least somewhat similar to it.
A nontrivial number of people are more like you, who want this specific music to be played and nothing more. But that perspective, at least from what I’ve seen, is not held by the majority of users. So we get random trash thrown in with our personally curated lists of songs and albums.
Catering to the majority is fine, IMO, since that’s what will pay the bills. I get it. From a business perspective it makes sense. However, ignoring literally everyone else in the process is not what I would consider to be an acceptable policy. Certainly make the defaults conform to what appeals to the largest number of people, but allow the individual user to customize their experience.
Since companies won’t do that, those that want to listen to specific music generally get pushed into having a local music collection, so it behaves in a way that makes sense.
Ah yes, Google Music was nice.
I’m so happy to still have my trusty iPod Classic 128Gb. I have a little Bluetooth dongle for its headphone jack (remember those?) that pairs with my hearing aids. All my tunes and podcasts in my pocket, no phone signal required.
Recently I downloaded iTunes again because I’m trying to consolidate my music library/listening history from all my old services and get them on Jellyfin.
And…I’d honestly forgotten how legitimately good a piece of software iTunes is. Not perfect, obviously, but I’d forgotten what it was like to have sophisticated music management tools. Just the sheer amount of options and tools to sort and manage the list, to be able to edit the properties, etc.
Then you look at modern streaming apps and it’s all just…terrible. The user is completely neutered. You can’t do even half as much with them. Things are just straight up hidden or don’t exist anymore, you have very few methods of controlling how things are organized or sorted, etc.
“Modern” design principles seem to be “you can just deal with using the app the way we think you should, we won’t give you the ability to make it your own”.
That’s what made Google Play Music so good: it was that beautiful sweet spot between the useful tool of iTunes-esc music management and the convenience of the streaming services. I didn’t feel like my hands were tied when using it like I do with Spotify.
Spicetify helps ease the pain a little bit
I only tried Spotify once. I read a reference to a song I wanted to listen to but didn’t own. Searched for it on Spotify, found it, and clicked to play it. It played something else entirely, not even by the same artist. I tried a few times, but it wouldn’t play that song or anything by that artist. I guess I just don’t understand Spotify?
I’m back on local only as well. Even dipping back into physical media. The thrift stores are my Spotify now.
Too soon, man, too soon.
I would give anything to get back the I’m Feeling Lucky button for music. It generated so many fantastic spontaneous playlists.
It’s right choice from google to discontinued google music because they already have YouTube, so…in the end it kinda redundant to have separate platform IMO
Google Music let you buy and download non DRMd albums, which ladt I checked isn’t a thing on YT music.
Nowadays i just use seal + YouTube for music, because some music that i saved from YouTube Music can’t be played unless i used YouTube
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GPM was my jam. It had simple features that I would later take for granted, like remembering the exact track I left off on, and the number of times I’ve played a particular track. I only keep YTM because it comes with premium (no ads on YT). The second they separate premium from YTM, I’ll drop it.
I literally just want to sort my liked music by the number of times it’s been played. I really, really miss that feature.
I used Google Play Music for purchases/online music locker and loved it. I eventually became that idiot that never downloaded all their purchases before the switch to Youtube Music happened.
Now I can’t even open Youtube Music because it loads up my GPM library and rubs in my face that I essentially paid to have a bunch of music pre-listed for streaming that now has unskippable ads that I can’t listen to unless I leave my screen on and unlocked.
I was too broke and slammed to get a new external drive in order to get all my music downloaded and saved from GPM at the time of the switch, but I look back on it and think about how I could’ve skipped meals and stuff to have gotten something with just enough space to save that music.
Your music is likely still there if you grab it with Takeout. Mine was. The only problem: one flat folder. I spent weeks with Picard working out which tracks where what by title and acoustic ID. So, not great, but I got back my own music files for some things I’d forgotten completely.
I just did it and it worked! It’s definitely a jumble of music files but it’s all there, every last bit. Thank you, thank you so much. This has been weighing on my mind for so long, there are so many songs I can put back on my offline playlists now that I have them again. You’re the best!
Aw, man! That’s great that you’re back in business! I’m chuffed that you get to go down memory lane like this now. Music=culture=who we are and shouldn’t be controlled like in the digital age bastardization of copyright.
Does anyone else remember when Gmail was invite only and you only got like 10 invites?
It’s how I snagged a “firstname.lastname” address. No numbers or anything! All the other people with my exact name out there can fuck off!
And as a bonus you snagged firstnamelastname without realising.
This alone makes Gmail a better service than most providers. All of the similar but different address confusions avoided.
It really should be standard practice.
Oh I know.
There’s someone with a variation of my first name (think “Steven” versus “Steve”) who absolutely cannot get their shit sorted and gives out my address as theirs all over the place using “longerFirstNameLastname” but fucks it up and uses my address instead. I tried emailing them directly once letting them know, got accused of “hacking their google” and now I just delete some important looking emails like travel reservations and digital gift card redemption things for Xbox.
Yeah I snagged one too; but all the people with that name seem to have made variations of it, and when they give it out, either they forget their own email address or the person they give it to just mishears and simplifies to first name.lastname. Needless to say I receive a lot of junk intended for other people.
A buddy has guy123 and has had it for decades. It’s commonly used for fluff email entries and he enjoys seeing the spam people are up to lol.
I have a first and last name email on Gmail and I had some dbag email me telling me if I didn’t hand over the email to him he was going to sign my account up for every spam service he could find also claimed he was going to hack my account but the brute force attempts and phishing emails didn’t work. This was a few years ago and I still get a ton of spam on that account and Google doesn’t have a solution for it so the account just sits there unused. I will take that email to my grave before I let some jackass in the internet get what he wants.
I was a day one GPM music user until it was discontinued. That app was my most used service ever and it took thousands of hours to curate my whole collection there. When Google killed it, I vowed to never become dependent on a Google product much less a cloud based service ever again. PlexAmp is my go to now.
I’m that regard, Google does a lot to propagate the use of free software and self hosting.
I really liked them at one time.
Yes Plexamp gang! I find the transition works for me too. I have a raspberry pi that just works with all my music on there. Paid the lifetime Plex fee too because I use it constantly.
Absolutely, the lifetime was worth it!
PlexAmp member reporting in.
