Daily reminder: Piracy is not about price.

https://archive.is/tFp19

This is why I'm still discovering and managing my mp3s like it's the 00s (warez/torrents). Never know when it's all going to be shut down. These services are still good for discovering similar music, but always have local copies.

They deleted my curated playlist for programming while I was a paying customer and with zero warning. I just moved to a new service (and in parallel keep my playlist locally, with good old mp3 files).

Thanks for the warning, but unfortunately when it comes to Google one must never be surprised when their data is no longer accessible.

Is this why they restructured as Alphabet? So they could transfer products back and forth between divisions and get promoted without building anything new?

When you get 'your data' ... which you 'purchased' (CDs last longer) ....better check through it to see how many Google links they stuck into it. (Ten years ago, they filled my Blogspot 'download' with them. Syonara forever, chumps.) Note that they want you, the purchaser, to transfer the library to another of their sites. They could do it (considering you've been a 'customer'). Cause they're moving their snake oil act on to the next town.

Why is anyone surprised when an advertising company stops supporting the flavour of the week side projects?

For the final quarter of the 2020 financial year, ~81% of Alphabet's revenue was from advertising.

They don't break things out much in their financial reports, it's essentially "Google Services" (the only profitable entry), Google Cloud, "Other bets" and corporate. The final three all lose ~$1B+ a quarter.

In the only breakout that has a profit (the vaguely named 'Google Services'), 87% of the revenue is from advertising. There's no indication of what % of the profits are from search, the "apparently not advertising" part of that breakout generates 13% of the revenue, but might easily be generating just 1% of the profit.

So, once again: Google is an advertising company. Everything else is a little side act, and just as likely to be dropped, because Ads are the only thing Google has ever worked out how to make money from.

I know the general feel with Google is "they'll shut this down too" and correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks to be more of a rebranding/merge save for the one click to port everything and lose nothing.

If that's true I just wanted to call it out since comments so far read like they're deleting content you've purchased with no recourse.

"The YouTube channel you're currently using isn't supported for the Google Play Music transfer."

Uhh... ok...

If you can afford to, just get a Synology NAS. Their audio station app [0] works quite well across devices.

[0] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/audio_station

I have been removing all my paid Google services one by one. it's a long process but so far I have managed my email, my drive and cloud, my streaming video service, and my webhosts and got repos.

everything is self hosted and runs better than Google half the time. I have a map plugin to use openstreet maps instead of Google maps, and I have everything running in a plug n play form factor. just plug into internet - wait 10 minutes for DNS to propagate - boom.

I'm sad to see Google Play Music go, I loved it.

I am now using YouTube Music, but it's a completely different product and a lot worse than Play Music. The "radio" in function in GPM was amazing, but in YouTube music it just randomly plays songs you listened too, so it combines rock songs with meditation songs, it's a mess.

Not only that, but when you export to YouTube Music from Play Music they give you the same experience as you would have had you not bought the music on Play Music. They make you watch ads to see the content you purchased and transferred. I'm sure this bug looks great in terms of revenue.

It's always funny when someone says that a product is going to be around just because big, stable Google made it.

Well I'm going to avoid buying more things from Google Books and Google Movies for a while. It's a little strange they didn't automatically transfer the music to YouTube Music.

My 'Thumbs Up' list appeared as likes on Youtube so I used a tool to download them all as mp3.

when could you buy music on Google Music (itunes style)? I was only aware they stored user music in the cloud and then later started a subscription streaming service.

Ugh this is my biggest concern about Google cloud

You can download an archive from takeout

Would it affect my music player

but, "don't be evil"

You cannot trust any google new product, there is always the real danger of them cancelling the project. Having a proprietary cloud, lots of engineers and good planning, I still cannot wrap my head around them killing services