So, I have a very specific use case. In my, ah, younger days, I pirated an absolute shit-fucking-load of music. In fairness to income-deprived teenaged me, I also bought a truly stupendous amount of music, and ripped all of that. By the time I graduated college and moved exclusively to paying for my multimedia content, I’d amassed a library of about 30,000 mp3s, all of which I uploaded to GPM. They represented a fair amount of popular music, but also quite a few oddities that don’t always make it onto subscription services, as well as old albums/albums stuck on previous record labels that sometimes disappear from the sub services because of licensing issues.
GPM rolled this library right into the subscription streaming library, including into search results. Looking for that cool song I liked in high school, something about demons? Search for “demon” and sort the list of all songs on GPM + my private library that contain the word demon by play count and voila, there it is! You could similarly sort search results by album, artist, etc., and your uploaded tracks appropriately were so sorted.
Moreover, having such a massive collection of my preferences already incorporated meant that the GPM recommendation engine was eerily on point for me; every week it’d melt my face off with awesome stuff I’d never heard of, and I spend a lot of my time reading about and searching for music.
Finally, because it was hooked into the Google Play Store, if there was an odd album that wasn’t available for streaming that also wasn’t contained in my old pirated backlog, I could usually just buy a digital copy, whose contents would then also be rolled into my existing library.
YTM fuckups thus far:
Uploaded music library transition was fairly painless, but a modest number of tracks refuse to transfer no matter what. However, the library is completely segregated from the streaming side of things; you need to go into a different search screen for it. In said search, there’s no way to sort based on song/artist/album at all (you have to do that through the library view, which then doesn’t have a search option). The service also doesn’t track play counts at all, so all that data’s gone, and there’s no way to sort for that anymore.
The streaming library itself is comprised of tracks uploaded/approved via a different system that is not the same as GPM’s streaming library. I’ve encountered a few cases where “albums” on YTM have track-gaps where older, non-compliant video uploads have gotten copyright takedowns, and new, compliant tracks haven’t been uploaded. Moreover, some artists/labels haven’t transitioned their upload efforts from GPM yet, so new releases are going into the soon-to-be-sunsetted service and not the new one.
Additionally, the recommendation engine is hot-fucking garbage. It primarily recommends singles, not full albums, and 70-80% of my recommendations are just current top-hits, not at all based on either my uploaded library, Liked tracks, or subscribed artists. Moreover, there’s some weird text formatting bullshit in the recommendation view where the designation Single/Album is displayed first, then artist, then finally the record name, but each box is only allotted so much space, and it won’t wrap or partially show text, so half of them don’t even list the record name at all.
They’re also reportedly shutting down the music purchasing side of things, so while previously bought albums will be included in my obnoxiously sequestered YTM personal library, I won’t be able to buy new ones to fill gaps.
Finally, the playlists are also now Youtube playlists, and vice versa, comingling two services that often have overlap but which are not identical in use for me, in a very mildly frustrating way.
Oh, also backing out of a song I played from an album by an artist I searched for takes about 1-2 more clicks/back button presses than it did on GPM.
Spotify/Tidal/Apple Music aren’t reasonable replacements for me, because I do rely on the uploaded library to grab those rare albums/tracks not available for streaming or purchase online, and it’s not realistic to keep all of those physically on all my computers and handheld devices.
