The thing that sucks about Google Music is that they could have merged them but kept the good parts of both. Youtube Music is still missing features of Google Music. It would have been more than "just", but Google Music with Youtube backend and branding would have worked. It is the backend song licensing they wanted to merge.

The same happened with Google Podcasts. Merged into Youtube Music, not even separate Youtube Podcasts, and it sucks.

Google Music's song radio feature was really good. It would play similar songs obviously but it exposed you to actually new artists. Meanwhile, spotify basically encourages you to listen to the same stuff all the time, It's like listening to my old CD collection.

I liked Google Play Music a lot but like any Google product it had a lot of issues. Still way better than YouTube Music.

> "I am feeling lucky"

YouTube Music still has this feature and it even uses the die icon, just like always.

> you could upload your library to it.

You can also do this in YouTube Music.

> But they killed it

They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.

Yeah, but if the songs in your Google Music library weren't on YouTube Music, you just lost them forever. End of story.

It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.

This isn't true. I have tons of stuff that I uploaded that they've never heard of

I lost my entire local indie music collection. I'm glad your interests were apparently more mainstream, but I can't listen to my high school classmates' songs ever again.

Are you talking about uploaded music? All of mine is still available and a lot of it definitely isn't on YouTube. Did you try looking for the uploaded music tab? It can be hard to find

> They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.

This is actually completely false. (Source: I worked at Google at the time this transition was made, though not on GPM or YTM).

Two completely different codebases and teams and in fact YTM launched missing a boatload of features that Play Music had. Including annoyingly the ability to use our own Chromecast features on the desktop/browser version. (I worked on the Cast team). There were quite a few angry internal buganizer tickets.

Why anyone trusts any streaming music service is absolutely beyond me. It will always get enshittified. I have 65GiB of mp3s I've accumulated from ripping CDs over the years and it used to be a burden to transfer around between machines. Now it easily fits on a thumb drive or microsd and it's easy to copy it onto all of my machines.

Yes, because you did not need to copy it to all devices. You could stream your own library at any device.

Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet.

AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.

I trusted it in 2008 because none of these things had been around long enough to have a track record of enshittification.

GPM was amazing for keeping my library accessible on a device with all of 16GB of storage space, but for recommendations, Grooveshark took the cake. Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, Youtube... None have ever gotten close to GS in terms of showing me songs completely outside my wheelhouse that I immediately loved. Also likewise cruelly cut down by cynical forces.

They could have Spotify market and just decided not to.

The thing that pissed me off was that I had uploaded so many indie local bands' CDs, none of which were ever on YouTube, so I lost more than half of my music library when they forced that change and there was nothing I could do about it, having long since gotten rid of the disks because I believed them that they would never delete my stuff.

(Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)

I am not sure what you mean here. I just checked my uploads and all my live music stuff is still there, as well as obscure published records.

I had CDs from all my high school friends' dumb little bands. All gone.

I don't care that nobody else on YouTube would ever have wanted to hear them. I don't even really care that the band members themselves would probably be embarrassed that I still had a copy. The point of buying the disk (and uploading it in the first place) was so that I word continue to have access to it.

Cloud is an unnecessary evil, in the Stallmanesque sense.