I've been a subscriber to Google Play Music for a few years, initially I think my choice rested on being able to upload from my personal library, which was more significant back in the days when there was much less parity in music service catalogs - this was circa no Beatles. Then they added the youtube tie in where you don't get youtube ads - very valuable. I agree with the general UI complaint, it isn't great. To add to the crit, the branding is weak - 'Spotify' is meaningful, 'Play' is not. Despite all that, I've decided $100/yr for music on demand and no youtube ads is a good deal for me.

I tried Spotify a couple years ago and the experience was terrible and I haven't been back. I don't recall exactly: there was tons of hype, I had to download and run an installer, then create an account and validate email, and then I could play a song, so I picked a song and got some audio ads and subsequent more ads and suggested songs that were not at all related to the song I picked. It wasn't just not good enough to get me to switch, the onboarding was repellent.

I probably won't be their customer but I'm happy to see them succeed for a variety of reasons: customers love it, they aren't FAMGA, and that slide deck on their organizational squads and tribes [1] was significant in my work life.

[1]: https://blog.crisp.se/2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile...

You listed the killer features of Google Music for me: no Youtube ads, auto-pay my favorite Youtubers, and upload my own albums.

Also the Youtube Music app.

I've found their catalog to be really complete, I've rarely not been able to find something specific I'm looking for.

Only advantage I'm hearing from Spotify music users is that the algorithmic selections sound really good. Meh, I put in about an hour a month of surfing different Play Music radio stations and recommendations. Works for me.

I don’t think it’s possible to really understand how great Spotify’s algorithm is until you’ve experienced it recommending a fantastic song, and you go check the artist out, notice they have less than ten thousand plays and have only released two songs

Idk how that’s even possible but it happens once a month for me

They use human curation for many of the pre-built playlists, but those humans are also assisted by some interesting algorithm work on the backend.

For instance, the Fresh Finds playlists - music that's good but very new or undiscovered - are made by curators who sift through songs and artists listened to each week by "tastemaker users". Spotify combs through their listener data and identifies users who have a habit of listening to music that later blows up and becomes much more popular. They tag those users anonymously and use their taste to inform the Fresh Finds playlists, which also feed the rest of the editorial department.

Really cool stuff.

https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/03/02/introducing-fresh-fin...

I read it's based on human curation - this is the clever part.

If you have songs in your playlist that someone else has in their playlist it'll find a song in that other playlist that you don't have. Offload the complexity of matching to humans already doing it.

Sounds kind of like pagerank for songs.

Yeah I could see that - if you think of being in a playlist like a citation.

> I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice.

I am also not a fan of Spotify's UI. I've tried in order, Spotify, GPM, and am now on AM. I may try Spotify again, since my first try was a few years ago and I didn't care for the UI and became annoyed after I built a playlist and half the songs disappeared one day (rights issue I guess).

GPM is a great deal because it also includes YouTube Red and YouTube music if that's your thing.

You can also get a deal on AM if you buy for the year for $99 and use an iTunes gift card that you can usually find for ~$80.

The AM UI is not the best, but since I'm on iOS, the integration is nice.

> why is it THAT dark and depressive ?

Different tastes. I love their green and black theme. it's focussed and clean.