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One of the worst kept secrets in the tech world has finally been announced: YouTube and Google Play Music are finally going to start converging. The new YouTube Music app will start rolling out next week with the long term plan to phase out Google Play Music. The new app will compete with Spotify with a $9.99 per month plan that will let you have unlimited skips, ad-free listening, and background playing; there will also be a free version that allows listening with ads. The current YouTube Red will become YouTube Premium for just an additional $2.00 per month on top of the YouTube Music subscription. Because the point of this article is about music playing, I will not talk much about that.
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| IMAGE: Google |
At first glance, this seems great right? There was no need for both YouTube Music and Google Play Music as they are competing streaming platforms owned by the same company (Google) so it makes sense to actually consolidate apps as opposed to offer competing ones (even for Google). This will better prepare them to take on Spotify and Apple Music. So far so good.
Admittedly, I tend to go back and forth between Spotify and Google Play Music, and yes, I am one of those dreaded FREE users. I love the playlists of Spotify, and I have found that it offers excellent suggestions to my created playlists; I also don't find ads intrusive to my listening experience. However, the one thing it does not offer is playback of locally stored MP3 files which is where Google Play Music shines.
I love the fact that I can upload my over 1000 songs to either Google Play Music or my device, and then I can play them whenever I wish. This is what originally brought me back to Google Play Music which I started using for all of my streaming needs at the time as well. However, I found that the playlists were sub-par and the music suggestions were greatly lacking. With integrated AI, it sounds like YouTube Music may be significantly better in these areas so now is the time to commit fully to Google's streaming service right? Wrong!
As far as music streamers go, I am pretty easily satisfied. I would like to listen to solid playlists, make a few of my own, listen to the music that I own, and have access to all of my favorite podcasts. It would seem that YouTube Music would be perfect for a free user like me, but there is one significant thing missing from YouTube Music that will send me right back to Spotify as soon as Google Play Music goes under: background listening.
While I completely understand the regular, free YouTube app not allowing me to stream videos in the background (it is a video site after all), I do not understand this decision at all in terms of music streaming. People seldom listen to music with just the app open unless they are in their vehicle or otherwise engaged at home; people love to multi-task. When I am at home, I often like to play some music while looking through my phone, and when I have my headphones in, I am often looking at other things as well. Spotify and Google Play Music both allow this functionality, and this, as well as the ability to upload my own music, made Play Music perfect for me. Why would Google remove core functionality?
Granted, I am a free user, and my opinion is irrelevant currently. However, free users are the most frequent converters to premium users; people want to make sure they like the service before diving in with cash. So while subscribing would remove this issue for YouTube Music, the service may not have that opportunity. Those massive amount of free users that either don't have the money right now or have no need for ad-removal will spend their time on Spotify as it will give them the best experience. And if they should ever decide to upgrade, where do you think they will spend their money? The streaming platform they have been on forever or one they are not familiar with because it did not provide an ideal experience in the past? I think the answer is pretty clear, personal libraries be damned.
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