YouTube Music is _such_ complete trash I'm planning on canceling my subscription altogether and going to Spotify. It uses YouTube videos to back up your song library which means, in my experience:
1) streams are of FAR lower and more variable quality
2) Some of the weird and wonderful music that was on Google Music is nonexistent on YouTube
3) COPYRIGHT STRIKES from YouTube videos apply to your music library(!?)
The whole transition is a horrible idea, and I wish they would have canned it.
Starting or joining new teams and inventing products "resolving" the exact same problem in order to get noticed and climb the corporate ladder to a Google Fellowship.
It's not a good advert for their services, and won't encourage anyone to buy into anything new they create if they just keep closing down services, including paid-for services. You just can't trust them to keep the service running.
I am sitting in the same boat I guess ... write backend systems that accurately bills customers and vendors daily but the idiots who takes ages to do their pretty tableau iPad presentations ranks higher.
For someone that was using GMusic as an online store of my own digitalised albums, what would be the alternative, to have something distributed that could stream across device?
This is exactly what I do. And for the precise reason that I don't trust some cloud based third party service to not become unavailable for reasons beyond my control, which is exactly what's happened here. Disk storage and backup for 400-500GB of mp3 and aac is cheap.
It's possible to get it going even better than strong. I have an old 60GB iPod that I swapped an SD card adapter into in lieu of the hard drive and then used the extra space to put in a bigger battery. The parts are super easy to find on ebay and now I have a 256GB iPod that can play music for 50+ hours straight.
Most NAS systems support Plex. A Synology, for one example, might be a better option than a Raspberry Pi. (ETA: If you have the money to invest in it, of course.)
I am planning on cancelling our family plan too. Most of tracks that I have listened are falling victims to a "loudness war". I guess they have re-encoded all of them with new settings. Now it is much more loud on YM to the point that I cannot make it lower - it is minimum settings on each possible volume control. I value my hearing more.
Also, all these little notes that I have put on some tracks here and there will be gone.
Someone in a high ranks of Google should take a clue, and once and for all say "stop it" with this "old bad, new good" madness. I have had quite a confidence loss in Google as a brand after Google Reader's demise, and nothing so far has improved it. Pixel 4 discontinued after 9 months?
Their brand lost so much confidence, that this is now to the point that at couple of different meetings over new tech directions, one of the common points brought against GCP and Go was that "This tech is from Google. We don't know if we can put a 10 years plan based on these technologies, given the Google's graveyard expansion rate".
I cancelled my subscription and switched to Spotify about a month ago. YT Music is absolute trash and they should feel bad for even trying to migrate users to it.
Spotify isn't bad, overall. The curated playlists seem better than Google's, and the auto-generated ones (Daily Mixes, Weekly Discover, etc) are solid. Music availability seems to be about the same, although I'm not into super obscure stuff so YMMV. The UI is a bit worse (can't scroll back in the currently playing playlist, Car Mode is really bad), and default streaming quality is subpar (but can be fixed in settings). I like the frictionless switching to different devices. Overall I'm happy.
I was wondering when this would happen. YouTube Music sucks so bad. They mix in all of my liked videos w/ into my music. Just because I upvoted Baby Shark Dance [1] doesn't mean I want it in my effin' music rotation.
Spotify is annoying because the radio stations are garbage & I can't (or haven't yet figured out how to) downvote music.
1) streams are of FAR lower and more variable quality
2) Some of the weird and wonderful music that was on Google Music is nonexistent on YouTube
3) COPYRIGHT STRIKES from YouTube videos apply to your music library(!?)
The whole transition is a horrible idea, and I wish they would have canned it.