They've had years to fix all the issues people have had with this - and yet everyone still hates it (based on Reddit / App reviews). Playing music offline is broken, browsing playlists is insanely slow, and it lacks so many basic features of GPM/other services (like actual random shuffle and not a smart radio that plays the same 10 songs). Combining Youtube Likes with the music thumbs up makes no sense - I now have lecture videos that randomly play while trying to shuffle my library (that I guess Youtube somehow mistook as music). Even how it integrates with Google Assistant is terrible compared to the old product.
I understand why the switch to the new service was needed, from a license/business perspective. But no idea why they can't just listen to their users and at least match feature-wise the product it's supposed to replace.
I've lost faith in Google's ability to produce software and not just endlessly rebrand things.
I haven’t heard a single consumer express enthusiasm for the switch to YouTube music. Anyone I’ve casually talked to about it is dismissive and doesn’t really understand what it's even trying to be. If anybody has heard anything from a user's perspective that is in favor of this, I would love to hear that argument. Otherwise I can only assume that this was a typical Google move where product people internally pushed for a rebrand to advance their own careers, at the expense of the user experience.
YouTube Music has the one feature I care about: A catalogue that includes everything from well-known music from top artists, to the random indie music that got a grand total of 10,000 views on YouTube when it was published 8 years ago.
Sure I could download these songs (assuming RIAA takes its teeth out of youtube-dl) and upload them to most music players, but YouTube Music facilitates discovery and does all the work for me.
Too bad it has worse playlist management than freaking Windows Media Player from 2004. Seriously, I can't fucking find my playlists. I can't organize them. I can't search for them. I can't even easily create new ones by dragging multiple songs into them. And the icing on the cake is they get polluted with my decade old playlists from YouTube.
I absolutely detest YouTube music. It's only redeeming feature is a halfway decent radio and it's library ripped from YouTube proper. Everything else about is a worse user experience by almost every metric.
Yea, as someone who listens to Nightcore/Japanese music, Youtube Music is by far the easiest way to listen and discover music. And the download offline feature has always worked great for me, a 100 songs uploads periodically to match what I've been listening to, so I don't run into the classic issue of using the same "I don't have service" music playlist.
Not that I don't get why people complain about the move (it is a dramatically different app), but Google is the only one with the actual usage numbers, and honestly I've never met someone who has used it. I'm guessing they weren't the best, while Youtube has some of the best usage numbers of any Western service.
It's great right now for you. You don't worry about Google deciding to go about things totally differently in 18 months and shut it down? I don't pay for Google products because they have a shorter shelf-life than a bottle of ketchup.
I was excited about the catalog until I tried to add Electric Lady Land, and they didnt have a legit version, just a fan made amalgamation of differntly mastered singles from the album. Honestly disappointing.
I was a longtime Google Play Music All Access subscriber. One HUGE benefit that YouTube Music has is the available catalog. I like a lot of obscure music and remixes that no one else but YouTube has. I also agree that it's ridiculous that YouTube Music doesn't have all the features of Google Play Music. Still this was handled much better than most shutdowns where there is no migration path. I'm glad that Google is combining some redundant services. 5 more years and they might get their chat situation in order.
The switch to YouTube music was the last in a long chain of disappointments from Google, so two weeks ago I switched back to iPhone after 8 years of Android. I really, really wanted to like Android.
The story I’ve heard is that way more people are using YouTube for music listening than ever used Play Music, and that didn’t seem to be changing any time soon, so it doesn’t make sense to put any more resources toward Play Music.
> Combining Youtube Likes with the music thumbs up makes no sense - I now have lecture videos that randomly play while trying to shuffle my library
If there was a way to say "no, this isn't music", this would be easily solved. But Google's fascination with "AI-only" solutions won't let that happen. (You'd think someone would be happy to have an extra source of training data!)
There definitely doesn't seem to be a vision anymore - just product managers rebranding things for promotions. Pointless features like Soli are added to the Pixel then dropped next generation.
With any new market they are just failing completely - unable to make a smartwatch/VR/AR platform. DayDream VR / ARCore / WearOS are all now just examples of them just throwing stuff out there with no long term commitment
This is so unforgivable. A playlist can be what? A hundred songs? A thousand? Ten thousand? This is a few kilobytes of data at most. Something has gone seriously wrong if the Google infrastructure and a mobile device with > 1gb of RAM cannot manipulate this small amount of data properly.
I think you're a few orders of magnitude off. If each song has 100 bytes of metadata, which is a reasonable guess I think, then ten thousand songs costs a megabyte.
I mean, your point still stands, but it's more effectively made without the exaggeration I think.
I understand why the switch to the new service was needed, from a license/business perspective. But no idea why they can't just listen to their users and at least match feature-wise the product it's supposed to replace. I've lost faith in Google's ability to produce software and not just endlessly rebrand things.