Re:YouTube Music, a new music streaming service, is coming soon
by Shebanator on Thursday May 17, 2018 @01:30PM
(#17093399)
It always kills me when people say things like this about gathering user data. I was an eng. manager on GPM for almost 5 years, and in that entire time I never participated in or even overheard anyone talk about the value of user data when it wasn't in the context of improving our music recommendations. Any benefits that other teams got from our user data were secondary at best, and we didn't really have time to think about that.
Re:YouTube Music, a new music streaming service, is coming soon
by mustacheemperor on Thursday May 17, 2018 @02:06PM
(#17093804)
It's only my speculation as to why all these deficiencies go unaddressed. It seems to me like GPM is not in any way incentivized to offer a product significantly competitive to other music streaming apps. If they're not even using the usage data, then I've really got no guess on why the app is almost unusable on an airplane.
Thanks for your work on GPM. Don't know when you left the team, but there was a time when it was pretty even to the other offerings and it's still got its qualities. After all, I'm still paying for it.
Re:YouTube Music, a new music streaming service, is coming soon
by vocatus_gate on Thursday May 17, 2018 @01:46PM
(#17093572)
So why does GPM suck so much then?
-Adding a song to a playlist causes the entire playlist to refresh back to the top -The app is borderline useless without a connection - queuing songs doesn't work, modifying playlists is inconsistent at best, and the app seems to arbitrarily undownload albums - There's no ability to sort or filter a playlist. Spotify has let you search within a playlist or sort by artist for how many years, and Google can't hash out the same functionality. -Sometimes modifying playlists seems to desync them between the device and server, or something. I'll click a song, which starts for a brief second and then skips 3-5 songs down the playlist. Likewise, sometimes songs skip halfway through, sometimes they refuse to play at all...This is for me the basic functionality of a music app and GPM fails at it. These problems seem server related because they're 100x worse when casting.
At least it comes with YouTube Red. Though the existing YT Music app inexplicably does not allow you to queue videos on a chromecast. Regular youtube, I can add a dozen music videos to an editable queue. YT music, you must play each individually. Does Google have product managers?