I was a paid Google Music from way back. The best thing about the move to YouTube Music was opening up all kinds of independent tracks and mashups that weren't available in official music catalogs.
I've been on Google Play Music (and now YT Music) for ~8 years. YT Music has a different catalog (by my estimation it's less complete than GPM's was) and also lets you pull up songs/videos from youtube (which can't be downloaded for offline listening like other songs, and are just kind of mixed in with everything else).
Artist and album descriptions are largely gone, and so is the ability to view your listen count of songs, or sort songs in your catalog by listen count (which was my favourite feature of GPM). I suspect they're doing this because they've changed their accounting to get away with paying artists less (the % completion rate to 'count' has changed, or perhaps they're not counting some listens altogether)
The one saving grace of YTM is that its predictive playlists are actually pretty decent, and there are a lot of them.
I can confirm that the catalog is less complete in YTM because back when they shut GPM I took the effort to migrate my playlists and I lost quite a few songs of them in the progress, and even more then within a year (of which YTM can't even tell me the title anymore, it's just an unavailable item)
Yeah, originally GPM actually had the ability to actually upload your whole music library, matchable or not, and let you listen from the cloud. All of that was available without a subscription fee!
I migrated my account too, since I have YT Premium anyway, but I don’t even know if that’s a feature anymore or how to access that aspect of my library, like, to add new songs from MP3s I own.
Artist and album descriptions are largely gone, and so is the ability to view your listen count of songs, or sort songs in your catalog by listen count (which was my favourite feature of GPM). I suspect they're doing this because they've changed their accounting to get away with paying artists less (the % completion rate to 'count' has changed, or perhaps they're not counting some listens altogether)
The one saving grace of YTM is that its predictive playlists are actually pretty decent, and there are a lot of them.