This is the email I received:
> We'll soon delete all of your Google Play Music library and data
> On 24 February 2021, we will delete all of your Google Play Music data.
> This includes your music library, with any uploads, purchases and anything you've added from Google Play Music.
> After this date, there will be no way to recover it.
> You can download your Google Play Music library and data with Google Takeout, or transfer it to YouTube Music.
> As a reminder, with one click, you can still transfer your music library, including uploads, playlists and recommendations, to YouTube Music before 24 February 2021.
The friction of walking into another room to find my physical copy is greater than just downloading it on my laptop.
With Google, it seems to be, "This was a fun experiment. We'll try something else now."
For music, I think the best option is to find indie labels who let you download and keep stuff DRM-free. Spotify is probably the best option for mainstream music.
Thanks for the warning, but unfortunately when it comes to Google one must never be surprised when their data is no longer accessible.
I don't mind paying for a hosted service as I don't have the time nor the energy to manage my own multimedia service and would like to have good reliability when out and about.
Any ideas?
To be more technically accurate, the playlist itself was not deleted, the ~600 songs in it were removed from the playlist.
For the final quarter of the 2020 financial year, ~81% of Alphabet's revenue was from advertising.
They don't break things out much in their financial reports, it's essentially "Google Services" (the only profitable entry), Google Cloud, "Other bets" and corporate. The final three all lose ~$1B+ a quarter.
In the only breakout that has a profit (the vaguely named 'Google Services'), 87% of the revenue is from advertising. There's no indication of what % of the profits are from search, the "apparently not advertising" part of that breakout generates 13% of the revenue, but might easily be generating just 1% of the profit.
So, once again: Google is an advertising company. Everything else is a little side act, and just as likely to be dropped, because Ads are the only thing Google has ever worked out how to make money from.
If that's true I just wanted to call it out since comments so far read like they're deleting content you've purchased with no recourse.
* Instead of a library of songs to listen to, you're listening youtube videos without the video. I make playlists with them and songs disappear randomly.
* The player is buggy. The music will skip, or randomly restart. Randomly a song won't play because it says the format isn't supported (which doesn't make any sense), and then the playlist stops altogether.
* In Google Play Music, you Liked songs and they would be in a Liked songs playlist. In Youtube you like videos and they are in a Liked Videos list. In Youtube music, after you've merged it, you now have a Liked list that is both your music from GPM, and every Youtube video you've ever liked that's also a song.
Youtube music is a drastic step backwards from GPM. I would've left for spotify already. but I appreciate also having Youtube without ads, and I don't want to pay for both services. I would've been happy with GPM sticking around forever with next to no updates, but Google always has to change something so managers can get their raises and promotions.
This is patently false. YTM has a library of tracks and albums that is equivalent to spotify or Google play music. On your phone it's a totally separate app from youtube. In addition to the spotify-esque library of music it can also tap into yt, which has a longer tail of indie stuff.
> ... player is buggy ...
I don't experience exceptional buginess in the player, although there are things that annoy me (same with spotify). However you are moving the goalposts, I thought this was a rant about deleting data? Now it just sounds like a rant about Google changing ux.
* ... merging likes ...
I also did not experience this problem but they did screw up the order of my likes which was very annoying. This complaint is still off topic though.
In my eyes, this is theft. Shutting down a service is fine. Theft isn't. I don't accept that company name musical chairs absolves Alphabet of its responsibility to render to me the goods that I paid for. I see this as a rebranding, not a ceasing, so in my eyes Alphabet still has a responsibility to me as a custodian of the digital goods I purchased from them.
Uhh... ok...
[0] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/audio_station
everything is self hosted and runs better than Google half the time. I have a map plugin to use openstreet maps instead of Google maps, and I have everything running in a plug n play form factor. just plug into internet - wait 10 minutes for DNS to propagate - boom.
I am now using YouTube Music, but it's a completely different product and a lot worse than Play Music. The "radio" in function in GPM was amazing, but in YouTube music it just randomly plays songs you listened too, so it combines rock songs with meditation songs, it's a mess.
Well I'm going to avoid buying more things from Google Books and Google Movies for a while. It's a little strange they didn't automatically transfer the music to YouTube Music.
