Music Streaming | The Technology in Our Lives
Two Reasons You Don’t Want YouTube Music. Period.
Why is YouTube Music such a bad app? Stop reading all the ‘YouTube Music Reviews.’ This is why you don’t want it.
If you google ‘YouTube Music Reviews’ or ‘YouTube Music vs Spotify’, you will find long lists of pros and cons. Start reading. Or don’t! The thing is… YouTube Music is as much a music app as I am the pope. Just forget about it. Stop wasting your time!
This morning on my business Gmail account, a pop-up dialogue opened up to tell me I could select which apps I wanted to be showed in the left column. So I looked.
I had never used anything in that column! There was Chat, Meet, and Spaces. In the settings, I could select to remove Chat and Meet but not Spaces. Strange!
I had never heard of Spaces, so I googled it, and here’s what I found: “Google Spaces is a discontinued mobile app for group discussions and messaging developed by Google. The app was intended to compete with Slack (…)” It was launched in 2016. But, wait… Didn’t they already try to create a Slack-equivalent with Google Wave a while back?
That is Google for you! Every time a tech company appears to be successful at something, Google tries to copy their product, fail miserably, and discontinue the service even before we heard about it. Remember Google Wave, Google+, Orkut, Latitude, and the list goes on?
Will YouTube Music follows the same typical Google path?
I mean… Already, YouTube Music is a new attempt following the death of Google Play Music.
Not only does Google like to throw billions at systematic failures, it also likes to do it repeatedly! They probably could have made the entire planet green with the money they spent on these failures… But that’s a different story!
I use YouTube, so I gave Google the benefit of the doubt on YouTube Music. Perhaps this time, they hired people who could do more than throw useless codes together. Well… Better luck next time!
Number One Reason YouTube Music is a Fail
It’s a music app developed by people who think it’s normal to be “watching” the music.
It’s typical for the free version of an app to have annoyance, like ads. And normally, you pay for the premium version of a music app to get various other cool features besides removing the ads.
But with YouTube Music, the free music app is not even a music app! As soon as the YouTube Music app ends up in the background or if my screen is off, the music stops. The only way you can use the free version of YouTube Music on your smartphone is by leaving your phone on at all times and keeping the app in the forefront.
In other words, to listen to music with the YouTube Music app on my phone, I have to stop doing anything else. Stop living! Take a yoga pause, breathe, and listen to YouTube Music.
This is so ridiculous, it is mind-boggling, even for a company notorious for failing.
‘Listening to music’ shouldn’t be an ‘option’ that comes with the premium version on a music app!
I can’t even believe I wrote that sentence. Who works at Google? In my head, I get an image of a bunch of engineers smoking something good and designing apps they never use with no input from the real world.
The idea behind listening to music (as opposed to watching videos on YouTube) is that you can do other things at the same time. This is why radio receivers were installed in cars, not TVs. But in their wisdom, Google engineers have thought it would make sense for people to stop everything they are doing for the privilege of listening to music on YouTube Music.
If only there were good alternatives to YouTube Music! Oh, wait… There are! Plenty! Should we add YouTube Music to the long list of Google failures already?
2nd Reason YouTube Music is a No-Go
There was one very good thing in favor of YouTube Music: the variety of songs already uploaded on YouTube. Since I am familiar with the YouTube interface, I figured I would make playlists of my favorite songs. I did.
Then, guess what happened?
Songs started dropping out of my playlists without my knowledge!
At one point, I wondered why I hadn’t heard a certain song in a while. It was part of a fairly short playlist I had prepared. So I looked at my playlist. And I noticed a few songs that were simply listed as having been removed.
Here’s what happened, I think. People illegally upload tons of songs to YouTube every day. Every once in a while, some of these songs are removed for all kinds of reasons, including copyright infringement. When that happens, of course, that song is not available on my playlist anymore.
But here’s the thing, Google: I don’t care for the source of the song. That’s your job! If I ask you for Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, give me Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. How am I supposed to know which ones of the many uploads are the ones that are safe to add to my playlist?
And then, at the very least, if you had to remove a song, show me what was the title of it so that I could replace it. Right now, all I see is that three songs have been removed, but… Which ones? Don’t know. And Google doesn’t care.
In other words, if you want to use YouTube to manage a playlist of songs, you need to keep a list outside of YouTube (!!!) because they will mess with it without providing you any information on what they’ve removed.
Goodbye YouTube Music!
The idea of using an app is that it makes your life easier.
The idea of using a music app is to listen to music you like while doing other things.
Neither of these ideas is fulfilled by YouTube Music.
In fact, to me, YouTube Music is to the music streaming apps what the cassette tape is to a smartphone!
So… Goodbye YouTube Music!
Today, let’s reach out to at least one friend to check out on them before it’s too late.
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“A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.” ~James Keller
I published this story in A Windy Life, a publication on Medium.
