Farewell Google Play Music....I'll miss Ye

 

Since 2011 Google Play music has been an alternative to the likes of Spotify, Apple music, and....Deezer? Yes, the music streaming industry is not truly diverse but it's still there, at least Play Music was there.  In 2018 Google announced a new service called YouTube music that would eventually replace play music. They mentioned that play music would still be available for use until the time came for YouTube Music was ready to replace it. That day came and I'm just not ready, it's with tears and sadness that I say goodbye to Play Music and hello to YouT...wait...no. 

 

 

Let's start with what made GPM so great, control over your music.  Many people have huge music libraries that they brought over from the MP3 age and paid money for. Regardless of that GPM allowed you to upload music to your own little profile and listen to that music across all your devices. Most titles that you couldn't stream or just wanted to own you could buy on the GPM music store, that music was yours paid with your money.  That gave you freedom to mix in streaming titles and personal titles from your libraries, not Google's. I also really liked GPM's interface especially how it handled the queue interface, swiping away songs you don't want and allowing you to clear your queue to make some room for something new or something different such as a podcast. 

 

 

 I never uploaded any of my own music to GPM because I stream everything, but the interface mattered a lot to me. Just trivial things such as podcast notifications made the app so good, a modern design is great and all but sometimes classic is simply better. That is my personal opinion because YT Music has some great features and allows you to still mix and match your own music with streamed music in playlists (albeit separated before). 

 

GPM was not perfect and some things really ticked me off, such as problems with play/pause, and the harsh reality that not every song or Podcast was on GPM. GPM was always the last one to get podcast episodes as well, sometimes it was buggy and would set back a podcast episode 5-10 minutes when you played/paused the episode. It was clear that Google was neglecting GPM and finally the final death blow came.  

 

I got an email from Google telling me to jump ship or go down with the ship. 

Google is determined to carry everything back over to YT music from your personal uploads to your purchased music. I respect Google for giving lifeboats to the people who jumped ship, hopefully those lifeboats reach shore. 

  

I have not used YT music so I can't really talk about it, but I can talk about what I did in response to the news.  I switched to Spotify. I had wanted to do this from the beginning, but I kept procrastinating for a lot of reasons (see above) but a week ago I took the plunge and switched.  

 

I had to manually transfer all my playlists in a 2-hour lengthy process of searching and adding. The Spotify interface was foreign at first and repulsive at that. I hate having to be slave to Spotify's whims and decisions, I want my home screen to respect my music and podcasts not the wishes of someone who payed Spotify to be on the front screen. The playlist interface and podcast interfaces are huge improvements over GPM, the podcast interface makes a huge playlist of all the newest episodes of podcasts you follow. I do miss the podcast Notifications but this interface so great I'm willing to forgive them.  I also discovered my daily mix, it's not perfect but it's getting better, my only problem is that for each new group of artists that play in my playlist I get a new daily mix so I have 4 daily mixes.   

 

 

I'll comment more on Spotify next week but for now I'll just honor GPM and all it did for me and all Music services.  Rock on buddy :)