I’m cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It’s funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway… there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn’t a thing.
The previous version was a music management and playback platform that had a store and subscription available. The current version is a subscription-selling platform with rudimentary music management and playback features. You can no longer buy an album, only subscribe. God help you if you want to do anything with playlists.
Also it uses YouTube’s algorithm to do random play based on a song. It sucks so bad it’s not even funny. With repeated songs and songs that have nothing to do with the song you started with. And if one of the songs in the list is sorta popular it’s just stuck in a loop of the most dreadful popsongs.
Not to mention wanting to play videos the whole time, where I only want to listen to music as implied by the name YouTube Music. And it mixes your video history on YouTube with the music history, so randomly it will start suggesting songs when you want to watch video.
It’s like someone at YouTube decided that watching videos and listening to music is basically the same thing or close enough. It’s utterly moronic.