'YouTube Music is a Bad Product in Desperate Need of Improvement Before Anyone Will Care To Use It' (androidcentral.com) 72
Andrew Martonik, writing for AndroidCentral: YouTube Music as a service has been around for about three years now, though it really only existed in earnest once the revamped version of the YouTube Music app and dedicated website, as we know it today, launched in May. Whether you look at it as three years or just six months old, one thing is clear: YouTube Music isn't finished yet, is filled with issues and is incredibly frustrating to use on a daily basis considering it costs the industry-standard $10 per month.
YouTube Music is so unfinished and lacking features that I question whether Google has any intentions of following through with its vision of replacing Google Play Music entirely. Put simply, I can't believe Google thinks anyone will pay $10 per month for it when all signs point to Google itself not caring about YouTube Music's success. YouTube Music effectively doesn't work with Google Home. [...] YouTube Music also still doesn't work with Android Auto, which is just as inexcusable as not working with Google Home.
YouTube Music is so unfinished and lacking features that I question whether Google has any intentions of following through with its vision of replacing Google Play Music entirely. Put simply, I can't believe Google thinks anyone will pay $10 per month for it when all signs point to Google itself not caring about YouTube Music's success. YouTube Music effectively doesn't work with Google Home. [...] YouTube Music also still doesn't work with Android Auto, which is just as inexcusable as not working with Google Home.
What (Score:1)
The RIAA was saying how it was taking significant sales away from them. Well which is it?
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Any number > 0 is significant.
Just like Apple Fan Boys they are Google Fans who will buy anything Google.
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Sometimes when it becomes clear that people don't want to switch they eventually cancel the old service instead, forcing everyone to either switch to the new, buggy, service with less features or leave the Google ecosystem entirely. (e.g. the old Google News & Weather app vs the new Google News app.)
Re:Stop me if you've heard this one before (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop me if you've heard this one before (Score:4, Insightful)
Many of us have learned not to adopt new Google services, period. They have taught us patiently over and over by rolling out Cool New Stuff and then deciding that it wasn't monetizing adequately (if they ever tried to do so, often they didn't) and pulled the plug, with little or no notice oftentimes.
Was it free? Not really, I am paying for it like other people do through Google's highly profitable ad business, and through my employer indirectly who uses their web business offerings and even GC. They just can't imagine that it makes sense to keep running services at modest cost as loss leaders to keep people happy with their ecosystem, and ready to adopt new offerings.
If Google offers anything new now I ignore it, since they are going to take it away anyway in a few years. They convinced me, finally, and I believe them.
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I thought Youtube's business model was to steal everyone's content
Content ID with the block function available to copyright owners shows that this is not the intent.
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I found that the normal YouTube App has crippled itself for You Tube Red only features, such as playing audio while the App is in the background, and makes a point to nag you about it all the time.
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That is the big problem with Google, they will often do these grand reveled, but not follow thru.
Not a suprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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Do you really want to know why they routinely fail. It is really quite simple, they are an advertising platform, that is their forte, that is their focus, everything else is bait for that platform. Now seriously, if you are fishing, do you really care about how good or bad that bait is for the fish or just that it will tempt them to bite the hook. So the bait needs to be just good enough to get the fish to bite and then hopefully as far as the advertising fisherman is concerned hooked. So they routinely cut
Same could be said for YT itself (Score:3)
Why do I have recommendations in my feed, that have absolutely nothing to do with anything I've ever watched, ever before?
YT is a mess....christ only knows how bad YT music is...
Google is gonna get sued over the ads. (Score:4, Informative)
I use good old youtube for listening to music in my car during my morning commutes. Using the google assistant, I say, "OK Google, youtube Chemical Brothers" and I used to get chemical brothers playback starting flawlessly on my drive without looking at my phone.
Last 6 months or so YT has employed strategies to curb this kind of use. Routinely the "Youtube Music" add with "FREE TRIAL MONTH" pops up and won't go away until I physically look for the "No thanks" button. That sort of distraction can lead to an accident. They've also employed the "Are you still listening?" and "Autoplayback paused" Luckily the latter 2 can be skipped by pressing a button on my bluetooth radio transmitter.
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. That sort of distraction can lead to an accident.
Lots of legitimate complaints to be had about youtube. Distracting you while driving is not one of them.
A better app won't matter at the current price (Score:2)
It doesn't matter until the pricing model improves. Before streaming, the majority of people did not spend $120 a year on albums, which would be roughly 12 albums a year. Some of the streaming services are doing ok now, but until the price point drops to somewhere between $5 and $7 a month and until the messy regional licensing stuff gets sorted out, they're all going to stagnate.
They have to choose - lose the extra revenue for the real music buffs or get everyone onboard and earn less per subscriber, but f
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Before streaming, the majority of people did not spend $120 a year on albums, which would be roughly 12 albums a year.
Do you have actual numbers on that? Anecdotally, in high school I spent way more than $120 a year on CDs. I doubt that was uncommon back then.
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Anecdotally, the majority of people are not in high school. Also, the majority of people are not you (I fact checked that one myself).
And obviously I'm not trying to prove anything with my anecdote, because that would be silly.
I'm just asking if DarenN has any stats on his spending estimates.
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It's a fair question. In this link [icce.rug.nl] 1997 music sales in the US were around 750 million units, in 1996 that was around 780 million and in 1998 it was around 850 million which averages out at less than 3 albums per person. According to this [statista.com] the peak was 953 million units per year. The estimated total sales figures from the first link give approximately $13 per CD, which matches my recollections of those long ago days :)
Those figures are for the US, Europe and rest of world was lower (I am not in the US so my
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Yeah but in a tight month I could sell them back to the store. If I bought them used I could get back over 50% of what I paid, if I bought new maybe 35%.
Also then I had a bunch of LPs, cassettes, and CDs sitting there on a shelf, I could look at it and have feelings about my music collection.
Just being able to listen to the songs, I mean, does that actually have value? Is it still a scarce resource? Am I supposed to feel wealthy because some company gave me access to their stuff? Surely not in the same way
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Most albums were 10-15 as I recall. Really popular bands would have fancy artwork and music videos and that was 19.99. Paying 30 for an album meant you were getting the one with the t-shirt and poster.
Goodbye Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Death of Google reader: OK, it's a big internet I can find another way to aggregate RSS feeds. And google says that's a dying technology anyhow.
Death of Google homepage: This one hurt a bit more. It was nice having a configurable homepage that I could point to the most personally relevant info on the web. I guess I can just make bookmarks and hit 5 different sites when I sit down.
Destruction of Google finance: So it's been a little less useful since google homepage died, but it's still nice to have my portfolio organized the way I want. All I have to do now is click on the shortcut. But wait, they just destroyed google finance. I can no longer even decide the top three stocks I want to show up on that page.
Death of Google hangouts: Great I finally got my entire group of family and friends to all use the same chat client. Now google says they are killing this by the end of next year. Hangouts, by the way, is the one reason chrome gets installed as soon as I build any PC.
So you are telling me that google has yet another project that they have released and are putting no love into. Go ahead, sign up, spend three years cultivating an app to play the music you want to listen too. Don't worry it will be fine. Google is a huge company. I'm sure you won't waste all of your effort getting this configured and trained, only to be abandoned on the growing list of google services that just cease to exist.
I have a pixel 3. I have youtubeTV for $35 a month. I use google search and chrome (huge advertising target). So, please don't tell me they don't make money from me using their products.
I think I'm done with Google. I really tried to be part of their ecosystem. They don't seem to care. So, I can't see myself caring to delve further into this bottomless pit of abandoned services.
I like it. (Score:2)
Sure, I use through a subscription to YT Plus (or whatever it's called), but YT music is great in the car.
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Because Google is a better deal (Score:2)
With Spotify, I pay $10 a month and get ad-free music on Spotify.
With Google, for the same price, I get ad-free music on Google Play, ad-free music on YouTube music, ad-free YouTube videos on YouTube Premium, original series and movies on YouTube Premium, and additional features on the YouTube app on my phone.
I pay the $10/mo for the sweetner - no ads on YT (Score:3, Insightful)
main reason I use it is b/c it gets the whole family YT without the ads (as a side-perk), which I value very much b/c my 8-yr old is a YT fiend on her ipad and I prefer her un-brainwashed by commercials. ;-) - on YT that doesn't happen b/c - like anyone - she can't resist the random links and ends up watching quite a variety of stuff. ;-)
Off topic but...
Her personal choice (I monitor her YT history) is to watch endless home-made vids created by other 8-12 year olds, which - while occasionally annoying to overhear - are harmless kid silliness and much richer creatively than the hours of garbage-grade mass produced kid cartoons my generation watched on broadcast TV.
At one point I put netflix on her ipad and took it off two days later b/c she started binge-watching entire series of crap (sound familiar?
The "Annoying Orange" channel tho. Damn. Aptly named. That's fine tho; kids are meant to like some things that irritate their parents.
I prefer curated playlists so I use DI.FM (Score:4, Interesting)
If you prefer curated playlists like I do, use DI.FM. It started with electronic music but evolved into a full music service with channels in all genres. The 64 kbps AAC+ mode saves a ton of bandwidth.
Google seems to be trying everything they can to recoup the operating costs of YouTube.
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I can't be bothered with putting playlists together. Even if it just requires me to hit "like" on a song I'm listening too, that's too much bother for something that is supposed be a passive entertainment source.
I know the genres I am into and when I want to hear Goa-Psy Trance, I don't want to break out my browser or app and drill down into my "liked" categories. I just want to tune to the channel and enjoy listening to the music.
Some of the stream-based radio platforms like SiriusXM and RadioTunes (meta
Wait, Youtube has a "music product"? (Score:2)
Youtube has a "music product"? I use Youtube all the time and can't recall ever seeing anything about it.
Tell me again, why would I want to get my music from Youtube?
Music? No, Ads (Score:2)
You don't pay the $10 for the music. You pay it for ad-free YouTube which also happens to give you the music app for free.
Still no Sonos integration (Score:1)