[Shebanator]

As someone who worked on Google Play Music for many years, I'd like to point out that a lot of the UX criticisms here are really just personal preferences, and those preferences are based in very large part on the way you listen to music. Some people are "lean back" listeners who just want to put on a radio station of music they like and not fiddle with it. Others are expert curators who have tens of thousands of tracks in their personal collections. Some are all about their personal custom playlists, and don't care about music libraries or radio stations at all.

It is pretty much impossible to build a music UX that optimizes for all three of these user types, since they want such different things. Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music have all made different choices in how they address this. Some of those were (IMHO) good choices, others weren't. But it is dangerous to assume that what works well for you will work well for others. The discussion about the queue here is a great example: one person hates it with a passion, another loves it.

[danShumway]

> It is pretty much impossible to build a music UX that optimizes for all three of these user types

This is a good argument for not tying music subscriptions to a specific client -- ie, allowing 3rd-party clients that are optimized for my specific user-type to freely hook into and stream from my Google Play Music subscription via an official API. The Google Play Music client is not optimized for users like me. I'm sure it was a lot of work to build, but I am not the target demographic of any of the interface decisions that have been made, and I curse the designers every time I open the app.

So it's weird that, say, Shuttle, a music client that is optimized for me as a user, can't hook into my account or even download my purchased music.

I don't mean to call out Google Music in specific, because while it doesn't have good public APIs, they're at least consistent enough that alternative clients are being made on desktop.[0]

But I do see this as a trend across a lot of SaaS services -- Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Apple Music. People complain that the services aren't optimized for them, and designers will roll their eyes and say, "you can't optimize for everyone".

And that's true. But who's fault is it that you have to optimize for everyone? Who's fault is it that you have to try and figure out how to balance a bunch of wildly diverse and often contradictory needs? There used to be really good alternative Twitter clients, and if Twitter wants to complain now that building one client for everyone is hard, I just can't muster the energy to feel sorry for them.

Apple's whole shtick is trying to get everyone to use the same official apps, to have the same consistent, good experience. I'm not sympathetic to a company that deliberately puts themselves into that position and then complains, "optimizing for everyone at the same time is hard."

[0]: https://github.com/MarshallOfSound/Google-Play-Music-Desktop...

[chipotle_coyote]

There are third-party music players for iOS that hook into Apple Music -- Soor and Marvis, for instance -- and take different approaches to their UX. (Disclaimer: I haven't used them and can't speak to their particular advantages and disadvantages; while I don't love the iOS 13 music player, I can deal with it, and I routinely use features like "Radio" and "For You" that the original poster was complaining about.)

But, yeah, I'd definitely like to see more services offer full-featured APIs and actively support, if not necessarily promote, third-party clients. Watching what Twitter did to their ecosystem was supremely frustrating.

[mcpeepants]

Google Play Music happens to be absolutely perfect for my usage (including the ability to upload my own tracks AND stream them). I'm extremely annoyed they are killing it off as I've tried everything else and it just doesn't work for me. The replacement YouTube Music is... abysmal. Well IMO anyway.

Only pointing this out because it speaks to your point. I think you're spot-on that APIs and embracing 3rd-party clients are the way forward. Not just for music, but any service where the primary UI challenge is making everyone happy (hint: a lot of services). I'd instantly support and switch to a service like GPM that put APIs first, assuming all the same back end functionality and catalog was available. Even if the "official" client didn't suit my needs.

[Finnucane]

You could have different clients for different kinds of users. But then you would almost certainly have users complaining that they need more than one client to do what they want.

[danShumway]

This would still (often) be strictly better than having those same users complain that there are no clients that do what they want.

It's also an easily solveable problem if the APIs are actually open. If Apple put out three music clients, you would definitely get people complaining that they weren't unified. If Apple shipped an open iOS API that covered everything in their official client(s), somebody in the community would just build one client that did everything a complaining demographic wanted, and then sell it for $4.99 on the app store.

When you see large groups of people complaining about current tech offerings for sustained periods of time, that usually means that the legal and/or technical barriers to entry to build alternatives are too high.

[azinman2]

Apple does have a public API for Apple Music [1], as does Spotify [2]. In fact, I frequently use a 3rd party client [3] that's all about curated music leveraging the Spotify API to stream the tracks.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi

[2] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/

[3] https://noonpacific.com

[danShumway]

I can't speak to Apple (I'm on Android), but I did look into 3rd-party clients for Spotify at one point and my impression was that the web API only allowed you to get information about songs, and remote-control the official client. The advice I saw online was LibSpotify was basically dead and that Spotify was probably going the same direction as Twitter: more locked down, more onerous developer TOS, fewer capabilities.

I'd be pretty happy to be wrong about that, since I'm fairly annoyed with Google Play. At the time, if I had found good enough API support and a good enough 3rd-party client, I would have switched services.

It's been a while since I looked into it, and maybe I missed something when I first did. I can see that Spotify is experimenting with a web playback API now[0], but as far as I can see it's still pretty limited.

[0]: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk...

[Finnucane]

And then people would complain that there were 1200 apps in the app store that did the same thing, and most of them badly.

[danShumway]

And those people can just be safely ignored. I get that people get annoyed at needing to sift through a lot of options, but the way to solve that is by having more curated lists, rankings, and recommendations.

I am almost entirely unsympathetic to people who argue that having too much choice is a bad thing on an app store. That's not a real problem.

[Finnucane]

>he way to solve that is by having more curated lists, rankings, and recommendations.

Yeah, sure, then we only need a few meta-rankings to know which of those we actually need to pay attention to.

[Shebanator]

I have a rule of thumb I tell my friends when they ask me questions of the form "X is so lame, why can't GPM just do Y?". The answer, almost always, boils down to laws, regulations, and contracts. This is one of those times.

[dpcan]

Exactly.

I live in a house of 6 people. We have discussed this at the dinner table, and it's just too bad the iOS music app isn't completely re-configurable so each user can make it their own.

When you start the app, it can ask "Are you a lean-back music listener?" "Are you an expert curator of playlists?" etc. And then it gives you a default view that's a little more suitable to YOU.

But they don't do this.

I use Pandora. I turn on the station related to the Artist I want, and this is all I ever do. I only listen in my car, so I sit down, plug in, open Pandora, press play. I don't even bother to change the artist/station usually unless I'm maybe sitting in my car waiting for something.

2 of my sons have vast playlists in iTunes. They create fine-tuned play lists and are constantly adding and removing songs from lists and creating different listening experiences.

My wife is a great middle-ground. She knows lots of music. She knows artists, new songs, old songs, lyrics. She chooses music based on her mood every day. She uses Alexa in her car to pull up play lists she has compiled on Amazon music. Her phone has backup playlists for plugging in when she's in my car and not willing to listen to whatever randomness I have queued up on Pandora.

Let's just say entertainment consumption in general is a broad topic. Creating the perfect player is impossible and therefore should be 100% configurable.

[lbotos]

Can we all agree that the "now playing" screen is objectively worse. I had to google how to set repeat and shuffle. (You have to "scroll up" from the bottom. Not swipe, but a scroll like motion.

I studied Human Computer Interaction and interfaces in college . It's hidden and unintuitive for no good reason.

[swasheck]

I’m a Google Play customer who is trying out Apple Music right now. There are many things I love. Obviously the seamless interaction with other Apple properties (e.g. CarKit) is great. I prefer the feedback that lets me know about the status of my song downloads, over against Google’s. I like Apple’s library and something about the way the base experience works feels more natural to me.

This is my biggest complaint. How in the world do I get off of the lyrics display and then how do I shuffle and repeat?

Also, if I want more by an artist than what I have in my library, I get to the artist and then look at the library and then have to swipe up once or twice in order to get the “show more by this artist” option. Minor annoyance and I’ve learned the pattern, it just took a bit.

[TaylorGood]

Yes x100. Or press the 3 dots. Finding the repeat function is unnecessary testing. Each time.

[Someone1234]

What surprises me most about your post is that someone actually worked on Google Play Music for multiple years. Doing what?

From what I could see, it shipped, then immediately turned into abandoned-ware which it still is today (in spite of being "replaced" by YouTube Music which is also abandoned-ware almost from its release).

I actually still pay for GPM (for Ad-Free YouTube) but also pay for Amazon's Unlimited because Amazon's Music offering actually consistently works well and makes music discovery pleasant. Or to phase another way, I actually pay money to avoid using GPM or YT Music which I could use for "free." They're that terrible.

[ssully]

I used to use Google Play Music but switched to Apple Music after they announced they were shutting it down. I tried switching to Youtube Music, but the UI was easily the worst out of any music service I've tried. Last time I used it the first few rows on your home screen were suggested music video's, which is not at all what I come to for a music app for. Maybe most people use music app's differently then me, but I think someone made a mistake by prioritizing Youtube Music over Google Play Music.

[Shebanator]

I worked on GPM prior to the youtube merge, and for a short time after. We did a lot of things: when I first started there it didn't offer streaming subscriptions at all, or radio, or....

[creato]

It may be abandonware, but it works well, and has very few bugs. I hope it stays abandoned in its current state for a long time.

[willis936]

I've been using play music since it came out and I pay for youtube red or w,e it's currently branded. I can't deny that the reason I chose it is still valid: I can upload my music and stream it. I have obscure stuff that is not in any licensed streaming service and it's nice to be able to pull it up on any computer.

However, there are many severe issues.

* It crashes every single time the app is closed in iOS.

* The ability to edit metadata is missing in iOS.

* iOS integration is missing features that are present in apple music and spotify, such as appearing as a music player in all contexts relevant to the OS.

* Duplicate tracks show up everywhere.

* Playlists often do not update when changes are made to them.

* Playlists sometimes just go missing for a while.

* The web browser interface gets out of sync often.

* It is not clear when tracks are ones in your library or from google's licensed library.

* Uploaded tracks are often deduplicated without warning or notice, resulting in lightly modified tracks and rare releases to be replaced with licensed versions.

* Sometimes I cannot get things to upload without trying a dozen times across multiple days.

This is par for google and it is bar none the the worst software I choose to use.

[OkGoDoIt]

Sadly it’s my understanding that they plan to shut down google play music completely in favor of YouTube music at some point this year (at least according to a friend-of-a-friend who works on it). It’s already quite buggy and frustrating, but I still use it mainly because I am on the grandfathered $8/month plan and also get ad-free YouTube included.

That being said I went through my Google Play billing recently and realized I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on Google Play Music over the years. I don’t think I’ve listened to that much money’s worth of music considering the songs are about a dollar each to buy and I don’t add that many new songs every year.

Someone should build a tool that scans your streaming library on Google Play Music/Apple Music/Spotify or whatever and adds all of those tracks to an Amazon MP3 shopping cart to help you transition off the recurring service. I wouldn’t be surprised if something exists that does something similar using torrents.

[nvarsj]

Maybe it’s better now. But for years basic playlist functionality on google music was buggy for me (randomly reordering songs and some other issues I have forgotten). Also no Linux app. Finally swapped to Spotify and never looked back. But I really miss being able to upload my old music.

[OkGoDoIt]

It’s been many years since I’ve used Spotify but I remember they had the ability to add your own custom music to your library. Is that no longer the case?

[wyre]

You can still play songs locally on Spotify, but what it lacks compared to GPM is the ability to upload songs and listen to them on another device.

[jochs]

I assume you're using it on Android and not on iOS. The Android client was actually really lovely from a UX perspective, even if I had some complaints about general functionality GPM was missing. When I switched to iOS this past year I immediately ditched GPM for Spotify because the interface was unintuitive and clunky and I haven't looked back.

[komali2]

Well one form of music being added to it is gone now that they nuked the artist portal thing.

[Drew_]

> What surprises me most about your post is that someone actually worked on Google Play Music for multiple years. Doing what?

GPM has been offered as a service for nearly a decade and has numerous dramatic changes and improvements over the years. Google Play Music is not even its original name and it did not even originally offer a subscription. It was created as a service for streaming music you owned from the cloud.

[teunispeters]

Something in common between both the modern "music" app from apple and google music app (android) is both try to push streaming services and there's no way to disable or block that.

Making them both VERY unsuitable to a device where a child has access.

[lloeki]

Go to iOS Settings -> Music. The first toggle is literally "Show Apple Music", which instantly disables all "streaming services" features, while keeping the sync-your-own-library-and-playlists-over-iCloud if you're a iTunes Match subscriber.

[teunispeters]

I've never had it stick. Not interested in any of their subscription services... not in anyone's.

I'll buy albums and copy them over to a local music share then onto android devices. I still use the "music" app on android, I just blacklist it from access from child - which makes me sad as there's a lot of music there they'd love to listen to. (Apple has terribly fragile screens. Android doesn't - at least if you go for the cheaper models. That's a whole different debate though)

[lightbulbjim]

Try foobar2000 on iOS. It should do what you’re after.

[nerfhammer]

Besides upselling incentivizing clutter, what's annoying is Apple feels the need to completely redesign the iTunes UI every year.

[reuben_scratton]

Good points. It may be worth allowing power users to choose which one of those archetypes they are via some advanced option somewhere, and that option controls which flavour of UI you get.