Yeah, I also used Play Music a lot (specifically because you could purchase songs and albums). Back in the day I waffled between Play Music and Amazon for buying tracks (I'm not in the Apple ecosystem).
The forced deathmarch to YouTube Music and its advertisement hell was a massive "fuck you" for trusting Google to at least not be assholes if you're buying items from them. I had a huge library of music purchased on Play and nothing worked to backup/download them. All the purchases disappeared in YouTube Music. Google "support" with the issues was... exactly what you would expect.
I didn't get into podcasts until a few years ago during the pandemic. But I refused to ever consider touching Google Podcasts. On the one hand with Google you know the entity you're dealing with so there's a certain ease that the name has vs trusting a different company. But increasingly it's just not worth it. They're like an elephant grazing on the savanna and you're a dung beetle. You can often find that Google shit is usable and useful, but they won't even notice if they step on you. I avoid Google if I can avoid it.
I was a paid Google Music from way back. The best thing about the move to YouTube Music was opening up all kinds of independent tracks and mashups that weren't available in official music catalogs.
I've been on Google Play Music (and now YT Music) for ~8 years. YT Music has a different catalog (by my estimation it's less complete than GPM's was) and also lets you pull up songs/videos from youtube (which can't be downloaded for offline listening like other songs, and are just kind of mixed in with everything else).
Artist and album descriptions are largely gone, and so is the ability to view your listen count of songs, or sort songs in your catalog by listen count (which was my favourite feature of GPM). I suspect they're doing this because they've changed their accounting to get away with paying artists less (the % completion rate to 'count' has changed, or perhaps they're not counting some listens altogether)
The one saving grace of YTM is that its predictive playlists are actually pretty decent, and there are a lot of them.
I can confirm that the catalog is less complete in YTM because back when they shut GPM I took the effort to migrate my playlists and I lost quite a few songs of them in the progress, and even more then within a year (of which YTM can't even tell me the title anymore, it's just an unavailable item)
Yeah, originally GPM actually had the ability to actually upload your whole music library, matchable or not, and let you listen from the cloud. All of that was available without a subscription fee!
I migrated my account too, since I have YT Premium anyway, but I don’t even know if that’s a feature anymore or how to access that aspect of my library, like, to add new songs from MP3s I own.
The way the Google Play Music vs YouTube Music crap played out is the worst (best?) example of "shipping the org chart" I can imagine. I worked at Google at the time, and it was just ridiculous to watch.
What kind of dysfunctional company deathmarches its users like this between two competing brands and products right in its own company, and is so committed to doing it wholesale that it's willing to mass-lose customers as well as features? The kind that puts its internal politics and product manager's careers and ideas ahead of customers' needs.
For at least a year after the transition you couldn't chromecast from YouTube Music on the web. The internal buganizer ticket on the matter was a shitshow. No accountability for the fact that we were killing something that worked and replacing with something that didn't even work with our own products.
Likewise, YTM on Android Auto was a similarly terrible backwards step in user interface and capabilities. It's been some years so I forget what irked me, but there was a laundry list of them.
At one point there were I think 3 Google product places where you could play podcasts; YTM, GPM, and Google Podcasts. None talking with each other about subscriptions, etc.
That and the whole idea of meshing a video recommendation system with a music recommendation system was just busted. My kids watched Minecraft or whatever videos on YouTube on the family (Android) TV So I started getting recommendations in YTM for video game music and what not.
The entire orientation of YouTube is around various random clips and the like. A music service like Spotify or (RIP) GPM is about albums and singles and EPs. YouTube's whole recommendation model wasn't built for it, IMHO.
GPM had a good recommendations engine. YTM pushed top 40 crap on me. I tried to tune it, but it failed.
I'd ask my Google display assistant device (I worked on them and had a couple around the house) to play some music, and it would spool up and start playing a video on YouTube instead. Because clearly that's what I'd want.
Harmonizing product lines and concentrating efforts and changing brands around etc is entirely reasonable. But you don't do it in a way that drops features and pisses off customers. You do it carefully and with respect. The way this played out was ... YouTube organization "won", Google Play team "lost."
I probably come off as an unhinged google hater to some, solely because of my extreme hate for google having killed Google Music. I loved that application so much, especially before it was reskinned with material.
That was an annoying and janky migration, but Youtube Music has a better interface than Google Play Music ever did.
Though conceptually it's still just weird. A video that I like on youtube because of the video component isn't necessarily a song I want to listen to as music. Also it really needs the ability to block music from certain artists.
As far as the android app goes I disagree. While there are minor improvements, there are major steps backwards in offline playing, library management and account management. An entirely frustrating experience trying to use the app.
I get that different products would be pretty siloed within their corporate structure, so I know that they weren't just going to use the YouTube code. However, why are products that are released well after plenty of other apps have forged a path so that the new app can research what works and doesn't work, what do people like/not like, and all of that type of basic information just so abysmally ignored so that this "new" thing is so inferior?
If you're not the first pioneering version of something, you better be doing everything the others are doing, but better. Otherwise, what's the point of your product?
I've been out of Google for over a decade, but my understanding is that their advancement metrics are still rather broken in incentivizing people to reinvent the wheel and call it new and innovative, rather than link some other team's code and contribute patches back.
I’ve also come to enjoy Apple Music. Has the same upload capabilities I liked with google music plus it matches them to lossless these days. Took apple like 5-6 years to make the ui not suck but it’s decent these days too. Also, no joe rogan podcast being recommended to me constantly when I just want music and there’s a nice separate classical music app too.
I don't think I've ever had a JRE podcast recommended to me on Spotify. They seem to have dialed down the podcasts in the front page (or at least they did so for people who care less about them, like me). I still get some and I agree that it's pretty annoying especially when I misclick on a podcast (especially jarring since podcasts have ads even with premium!)
Nothing is worse than constantly seeing jre show up on your cars CarPlay/android auto screen because of Spotify. I will never use them again because of that. Also their high bitrate lossless rollout was a lie.
