Mors googlorum (Death by google)

So, Google decided to shut down Google Play Music and replace it with Youtube Music. Frankly, it’s not unexpected. The morons managed to close way better and useful project like the Reader, why wouldn’t they do the same for a relatively low effort platform like GPM((we can discuss about how much low effort it is. It might be high effort for people like Trilulilu doing Zonga, it’s not for a multi-billion company))?

Google Play Music was a front for a music store accessible with a subscription, and the interface for listening to the songs bought via the Play Music Store. It allowed you to upload 50.000 songs you owned (for example my CDs), and it offered probably the poorest player experience from any music platform out there. A bad recommendation system, a bad „personalized radio” system, incredibly hard to navigate playlists, but, with its faults, it allowed you to navigate through a list of records. Most of them were badly registered, a lot of records (less popular ones) were poor quality, some with CD skips or digital artifacts from bad rips (a sign that they took the content people uploaded and posed it as their own legitimate content). The music was a bit organized, but badly, a lot of junk „Deluxe” editions that replace the original editions and that contain extra junk nobody ever asked for.

Now they decided to replace this bad system with an even worse one. YouTube Music is still in its infancy, the catalogue is badly organized (BB King has over 100 discs released from 2016 onwards, but he probably was quite lazy during his lifetime to get anything out), even worse than GPM’s. There are no quality settings for music downloads: there can be only one quality, and that is „bad”, because that’s how youtube usually sounds like. And the fact that it shoves videos down your throat does not make things better.

And I know what happened there. There are two things. The first one is the software developer thing where they say „the program is written in an awful manner, I have to rewrite everything”. The second one is the new manager that wants to create a product to make his quota in a saturated market, so they basically create a new version of the product and cannibalize the users of the existing product instead of fixing whatever was to be fixed on the previous one.

Unfortunately, knowing Google, this is the stage in which YouTube Music will die, in 3-4 years’ time. There will be no decent playback client, the interface will be crowded with spam and the recommendation system will follow the „let me fill your recommendation bar with conspiracy theories” algorithms that made YouTube the big success of today. Just like Apple, Google shows that it has no soul and love for the products it spits out every other year, and absolute hatred and dismay for the paying users.

But at least the YouTube Music has dark mode. I bet this is something that was impossible on the previous platform.