My Hub arrived just in time for me to claim the 6 free months of Youtube Premium that also comes with Youtube Music & GPM. Youtube Music seems alright, but since most of my listening is done on a desktop I don’t think I’m the target market.
I can’t wait for YouTube Global Positioning System!
I figured out something cool about Youtube music today.
You can do a search for music, and you know how Youtube itself has lots of music that these streaming music services don’t have because some random person uploaded them on there? Well, I discovered today that the Youtube Music app also lists those in the search results, even when the songs are not available on the main Youtube music lists. So for example, the Altogether’s Full US Album, with the bonus disc, is not available on Youtube Music or Spotify, but it is on Youtube. And the app lets me play all but two of the songs on that bonus disc. I’m not sure what’s up with the 2 songs. Regular youtube on a browser lets me play those two songs as well, but not the app.
Still, it’s pretty cool that you can take advantage of Youtube in this app.
Sure do wish they’d finish porting all the content and features of Google Play Music to YTM so I could switch. Cuz I ain’t losing my playlists. Or my 30k uploaded songs. Or my playcount/rating history. . .
I’ve made an effort to try Youtube Music, using it instead of my iPod in the car. It’s… fine. The offline playlist doesn’t refresh often enough, imo, and the app does a poor job of remembering where I left off - often resuming 5 or 6 songs back from the last one I heard. For 5 bucks a month I’d consider keeping it, or bundled in with the cost of YouTubeTV I’d consider picking that up as well.
Youtube Music was supposed to add functionality from Google Play Music a few months ago, but it never worked right.
For example, Play Music has this feature where I upload several albums I own to Google, and then I can download those albums on my phone in the Play Music app. Those are on my phone. Youtube Music was supposed to be able to detect the music I had locally on my phone, but it still can’t. So I still use Play Music to play those albums.
And now with Android 10 phones, they’ve made Youtube Music the default music app that comes pre-installed on new phones. Google Play Music is not there, though right now it can still be downloaded from the app store. I bet that won’t last too much longer.
Hopefully they’ll add the functionality of Play Music to Youtube Music before that happens.
This is Google. They have still not managed to bring Hangouts up to the basic functionality of Talk and are now abandoning Hangouts in favor of something no doubt less useful. I wouldn’t hold your breath.
GPM/YT Music is one of those things Google invested in because Apple did it. They don’t have a strategy. It’s amazing to me that GPM is still available and works. YT Music was supposed to replace it in like 2016.
It’s just so amazing to me. Google could absolutely compete with Apple on the user experience. Their apps individually are generally pretty good. But they constantly trip over themselves because of don’t-really-give-a-shit-ness and end up amputating or abandoning parts of it that users rely on. It’s like they don’t really want to be competitive. GPM and many 3rd party apps can cast downloaded albums to a Chromecast, but YTM can’t. Why? Google has all the pieces of a well-oiled, highly functional ecosystem, but just can’t be bothered to put them together.
Despite all the noise regarding YTM, GPM still works great, and if not available by default on Android 10, is a download click away. I’m not going to start the hand wringing until/unless they retire GPM having not integrated the cloud library feature.
It’s still the best deal out there. Pretty much the same streaming library, plus up to, I think 30000 of your own songs in the cloud library AND YouTube Premium for no-ads, for the same price as other music only services.
Well, it’s slightly more. Youtube Premium is $12 a month, which includes what used to be called Youtube Red, and Youtube Music Premium (which is $10 a month by itself).
My YouTube premium is still billing at $9.99/month, now I can’t remember if I was grandfathered into that or if it’s a promotional rate or what.
True, people on the old pricing are still grandfathered into that rate. I got my pixel 3 (nov 2018) after they’d already changed the rate, so I got 6 months of Youtube Music for free, but then after that, YMPremium was going to be $10/month by itself, not including Youtube Premium stuff that’s on top of that.
No one asked for this.
I got an email today saying Google Play Music will be discontinued, and there’s an option to transfer my music to Youtube Music. But the email didn’t have the right link to do said transfer. Anyway, I googled it and got to the right page. And I hit the transfer button. And now, I got a notification from Youtube Music on my phone that the music had been transferred.
Well, guess what? This is garbage. All the transferred music, I can’t even sort it by artists or albums properly. They got imported as “Playlists”. So there’s pages and pages of albums that are “playlist: artist name: album name.” Gah. This is so stupid. Fuck you Google for this horrible implementation.
Btw, this is not just for the music I had uploaded to Play Music, it’s also for all the albums that I bought on Play Music over the years.
Yup. It’s fucking awful and I’m out once GPM goes down unless YTM gets 100% feature parity.
I’m dreading the change over. I’ve never purchased any Google music so that’s not an issue, but all my burned CDs and mp3 collections are there.
Seems like a good reason to invest in the lifetime Plex pass to me—better to control my own media.
I’m confused about what you’re describing. The transferred music shows up sorted by album under Library > Albums > Uploads for me, with analogous views for songs and artists: https://music.youtube.com/library/uploaded_albums
The only things that got imported underl Playlists were two manually created playlists.
Yeah, sorry, it’s a little weird to describe. Nothing actually showed up under playlists. But under Albums, all the “Best of” albums from Google Play Music showed up as Playlist: title", and other albums just showed up alphabetically by album name, but you can’t sort it by album artist, for instance. Or you can sort it by Artist, but then that’s just a massive list, with most artists only having one song.
