> Google Play Music

The perfect music service and discovery engine. Axed for no cause.

I don't like Spotify or Pandora, and I'm filled with seething hatred for Youtube Music. I keep trying to use it, but it's horrible and doesn't play what I want to listen to. How can you design an app that's so bad that it actively does what you don't want?

YouTube Music plays meme videos [1, 2] in my alternative music stream. And anime music I listened to ten years ago in the middle of my EDM. Seriously what the fuck, Google? I never asked to mix my YouTube viewing experience with my music tastes.

For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to music. I want to go back to managing my own highly curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxp8qPEwSXM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE

>For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to music. I want to go back to managing my own highly curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.

I'm sorry, I'm sympathetic to your main point but this reads to me as... silly, to put it lightly. Google made you give up on music? You could do nothing but play CDs and still have absurdly more access to music than anyone in history. Music has literally never been more abundant, discoverable, and obtainable than it is today. The technology to replay it has never sounded better for a given price, and never been more ubiquitous. Neither has the tech to create it - there is an incredible Cambrian explosion of musical styles happening right now, as more people than ever before have access to studios and are using the internet to borrow and remix each other's work in interesting ways. This is an incredible golden age for music. And you can't be bothered because Google axed a product? Can't even be bothered to do it the old way?

This was the one digital service I was happy to pay google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer services going forward.

Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.

Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands, but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.

> but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.

I think that inverts history. The YT Music implementation and brand existed long before the decision to replace GPM with it. The branding decision followed most of the reimplementation, it didn't provide an excuse for it.

Google has a strong tendency to have multiple parallel offerings in a field for a while before consolidating them (and, also, a history of botching the consolidation.)

My impression from second and third hand sources was still that YT Music implementation and brand was after GPM was asked to "code freeze" and the team directed to other projects (including some to YTM). That the products stood side-by-side for so long is only further indictment on the rewrite-the-world approach that it took them so long to reach "feature parity" enough that they felt comfortable sunsetting GPM, well after the writing had been on the wall, the development ended, and the marketing decision to change brands had been handed down.

The multiple parallel offerings thing is of course its own problem that seems to often indicate communications issues up/down the decision chains, but specifically with reference to GPM/YTM I heard it was more a symptom of a rewrite than one of those communication breakdowns. Though again, that's only from impressions I got from scuttlebutt I heard second and third hand.

Lync itself was a rebranding of Office Communicator, by the way.

Yes, that factored in as another reason it was a good analogy.

> But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service.

I still can't work out how I'm supposed to listen to an mp3 on my phone now. YT Music has a "Device Only" button which I thought was simple enough, but then it just refuses to actually play anything I select.

Force...

Yeah, I am not going to use the new thing at all. Will go the same way the last new thing did.

Repeat this a few times and users are seeking. I am.