The YouTube music disaster
Gun, meet foot. Another Google failure.
On 4th August 2020, The “YouTube Team” announced that YouTube Music will replace Google Play Music by the end of 2020. By December, the music collections will get deleted unceremoniously.
We have known for a while that this was coming. Rumors started as early as 2015 when YouTube launched a dedicated music app. Since then, it has been 5 years and counting and at no point it felt complete. In typical Google fashion, they had unleashed yet another app for an existing paid service and neither was polished.
I think most users of Google Play Music would agree with the following statement from Ars Technica:
Even though Google Play Music was a dated, ugly mess of an app, it worked. For people with music collections that can’t be replicated by a streaming-service catalog, Google Play Music let you easily get this music on nearly every device, for free, with a simple upload process.
For long time customers of Google Play Music, it was a difficult proposition to switch to any other service. I was one of the first subscriber to the service back when it launched in 2011. Since then, there were times I personally envied the shiny polished desktop apps from Spotify. I felt left out in the low adoption of the service among my social circle as they shared Spotify playlists that I couldn’t participate. Giving into the temptation, and finding out how much better the mobile experience is on Spotify. How, over all these years, Google has treated their paying customers as second class citizens.
Despite all this, a number of customers, like me, clinged on to it. Google even added YouTube Red/YouTube Premium in the bundle. I personally would never pay for it as a separate service but I didn’t mind the ad-free experience and some other goodies that came with it.
As time went on, many music store options disappeared. Making Play Music one of the few options to “carry” your personal music library in cloud. Lastly, the main reason I stayed with Google Play Music, the recommendation engine. No other service came close to recommending the right tracks for the right mood while giving you enough wiggle room to discover new artists/bands.
Going back to YouTube Music, I tried it when it first came out and found it lacking. Then, I started hearing reports that YouTube Music would be replacing Google Play Music. I wasn’t averse to the idea. I thought due to YouTube’s licensing, it might give Google access to larger library of tracks.
I figured, it would happen over time once they have worked out the kinks in the existing YouTube Music app. Honestly, I even justified them essentially abandoning the Google Play Music app in favor of YouTube Music app. I thought as long as we get one polished app, I don’t mind using a broken app for a while.
Then it finally happened. I got an email asking me to transfer all my music to YouTube Music. Excitedly, I transferred my music and waited. About an hour later a notification on my phone alerted me to the completion of the transfer.
I was excited to try out this new app. However, the more I tried it the more I became frustrated. The app that took 5 years in the making was not complete. Forget about completion, it didn’t even had parity with Google Play Music.
Among the myriad of problems with YouTube Music, the following are just a glimpse (I am not even going to address the free vs premium debate):
- Media Keys support. (desktop, you need to uninstall play extension and it’ll work)
- Transfer does not preserve play count. Nor does it provide a way to sort by play count
- Offline playback requires downloading tracks.
- Editing metadata for tracks.
- YouTube video content getting mixed unexpectedly into YouTube Music.
- The play queue will not load all tracks from playlist. Only if you play the last track, it would load the next set. This wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the next issue.
- Laggy, unresponsive UI. I cannot believe that I have to type this. They have already done this once. Did they simply forget how to do it? The play music interface does all of this and more and never had the issues I have experienced with YouTube Music.
- No way to switch between audio and video on desktop for the tracks in queue. (GPM would show a play icon for music videos — if available)
So I wondered. I wondered what has become of Google. A company that at one point I respected and wanted to join. A decade later, I don’t feel the same way. I now question not only the motivations but even the quality of their software. Being a developer myself and having being in the industry for a decade, I have seen pretty much everything there is to see. The closer you are, quicker you become disenchanted. In what world did a PM let a project release that is objectively worse than the product it replaces. This speaks to me at a deeper level as an engineer.
The dysfunction at Google.
Several publications in the past have made similar observations about Google, and I am just another one saying nothing new. However, what I see is a culture problem at Google. The mess Google made out of any number of messenger apps. The recent rush to force Meet down the throats of everyone to get a swinging chance at Zoom. This is despite their early success with hangouts and failure to convert that into anything meaningful. Almost killing it and then doing a 180 for enterprise. All while promoting alternate options like duo. Or many other half-baked services that were released/killed or abandoned. This is not isolated to specific services or products. This dysfunction is pervasive in the Google culture. Every single product at Google suffers from this. Even Android and their hardware (Pixel) division seems to suffer from this. The only products that seems to run like a well-oiled machine despite Google are the Maps and Photos divisions.
This clearly shows the lack of a clear vision to achieve a singular goal. The disconnect between teams, the dysfunction between departments and organizations. How much duplicated effort? How much wasted effort? How many restarts?
Any developer/PM/dev manager worth his/her salt can see these problems but Google is too big and seems blind to the same problems. As it seems, blind, to the customers feedback. It is sad to see this from outside because a younger me, looked up to the people at Google.
Darkness reigns at the foot of the lighthouse.
