YouTube Music is Killing Music Ownership
Google won’t allow users to re-download their music files on YouTube Music, effectively ending the company’s often lauded music locker service.
It’s 3 a.m. and the blue light from my Samsung laptop is projecting off the walls, an impromptu nightlight. My computer has been idling for hours like a forgotten statue, the desktop showing no signs of life beyond an off-white dialogue box and a blue bar.
“6,474 songs out of 17,347 downloaded,” reads the Google Play Music Manager, as it accesses a decade of my stored data.
One of the hallmarks of Google Play Music is the desktop app. Janky at times, it allowed users to upload and download music from a specified location on their computers to their accounts. No browser login. No tabs. Just a handy background app churning away while essays are written, or photos are edited.
Plenty of music streaming services allow users to upload their collections. Generally, songs are matched with existing titles in the database, and are stored in a separate part of the app interface from the broader catalog. Apple Music, Spotify, and at one point, Amazon, all allowed self-created libraries to be hosted on their platforms.
Google’s innovation, however, lay in the details. A right-click on any owned song in on the webpage app would allow users to re-download the track as an MP3, just as they had when they uploaded it.
Google’s music locker feature — “locker” implying being able to store and remove items — was a new-age, digital alternative to a hard drive. Personally, my music collection spans thousands of songs purchased on iTunes in its heyday, along with hundreds more CDs and mixtapes. It’s a hassle to re-copy those files when my laptop fails or phone falls in a puddle. Google Play Music’s storage assuaged those problems.
Music curation is a deeply personal affair. Listeners take pride in their libraries. Making mixtapes or playlists is an intimate expression of one’s listening habits fueled by music ownership. Storing a CD or a FLAC or AAC or MP3 file is accompanied by the power to move that music onto a new computer, phone, or store it on an external drive for safekeeping.
Now, after years of digital logjams, the demise of Google Play Music is near. Earlier this month, Google announced it would begin rolling out its YouTube Music Transfer tool to Google Play users ahead of Play Music’s cancellation by the end of 2020. With it, goes users ability to redownload their stored music libraries.
Google had doomed Play Music as early as 2018, when developers of the parallel service YouTube Music suggested the former would cease operation once the latter was fully functional. For years, Play Music competed alongside major music players by combining music purchasing with streaming, curation, podcasts and users’ ability to store their own music tracks. Colloquially termed a “music locker”, it was the sole feature Play music had when it originally launched in beta in 2011.
Nine years later, however, Google is killing the ability to re-download users’ owned music, and with it, is changing the meaning of music ownership.
The field of digital rights management (DRM) is sloppy. In the mid-2000s, the rise of video game emulators like Visual Boy Advance and Dolphin saw users pirating games for both enjoyment and archival purposes.
Sites that hosted ROMs, or read-only memory, were in no uncertain terms illegal, allowing free access to otherwise paid software. Though authorities used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to crack down on such sites, the prevailing, if inaccurate, response was, “If I purchased a copy of the game, I can download the ROM.”
That’s not entirely true. While gamers are legally able to create their own digital versions of software they purchased, the same way they could back up a CD or computer program files, the act of sharing those files is illegal. Downloading those ROMs from a website is legally gray — DMCA takedown requests tend to target the entities offering the downloads, rather than the end users saving them.
Still, emulation itself is heralded in the gaming community, with companies like Nintendo and Sony offering virtual access to their back catalogs of games through subscription services like Nintendo Online and PlayStation Now.
In music, however, DRM operates differently. Music stores like iTunes, which is now encompassed by Apple Music, specify in their terms and conditions that users are licensed content “only for personal, noncommercial purposes.” Additionally, delivery of said content doesn’t transfer commercial or promotional rights to the user. Just because you own the explicit version of Lil Jon’s “Get Low” doesn’t entitle you to use it in your little sister’s bat mitzvah video.
Other regulations specific the number of devices that can play downloaded content (usually between five to 10) or the ability to re-download or burn music to CDs a limited number of times. Likewise, these terms tend to grant providers like Apple the caveat that allows them to remove access to tracks and media without notice.
But what about physical media that is uploaded to cloud storage? Google Play Music was unique in that it allowed users to re-download the file to a track after uploading it digitally. If your original CD was scratched, you could export copies of your media and save them both digitally and physically, hassle-free.
Google might have its reasons for removing this feature from YouTube Music — I was hard pressed to find any mention of why, with Google’s support forum making no mention of downloading previously uploaded content — though it’s not like there aren’t preexisting roadblocks to file sharing. Purchased song files are tagged with users’ account info, preventing them from sharing uploadable copies of their music with others.
The problem is they are removing this feature without warning their users. The company broadcasts that it will supply a transfer tool for Play Music users to easily swap their collections to YouTube but fails to note that there is no reclaiming the files once on YouTube. It’s a one-way street.
The lack of uniform judgement over digital media sweeps changes like this under the internet’s rug. Revenue concerns regarding saving audiovisual content date back to 1984. In Universal City Studios v. Sony Corp., the United States’ highest court ruled that videotaping a TV broadcast falls under fair use of media, as it did not infringe on the original copyright holder’s ability to generate money. Decades later, the use of an Ed Sullivan Show clip on Broadway’s Jersey Boys was deemed fair as it was transformative in nature.
One of the few rulings on music as it pertains to downloading came in BMG Music v. Gonzalez (2005). Cecelia Gonzalez claimed that downloading files on peer-to-peer website KaZaa was fair use, appealing that it was a “try before you buy” technique to determine whether she wanted to purchase the full song. Though the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against her, it still didn’t make mention of access to digital files that were previously purchased or created by a user’s owned physical media prior do downloading.
The short of it is that, for now, major companies like Google still have industries like music in a stranglehold. Beyond devaluing compositions such that the only way for artists to make a living wage is through tours and merchandise, streaming services are changing how consumers value the end product, creating a never ending swell of content that boasts rentals over true ownership.
The moral of the story? Before you switch to YouTube Music, get yourself a hard drive.
(Google’s press office did not reply to my request for comment for this story.)
