YouTube Music is a poor replacement for Google Play Music

Google is replacing Google Play Music (GPM) with YouTube Music (YTM) starting this month and shutting down GPM entirely in December 2020. Google is touting YTM as a great replacement for GPM but are conveniently not revealing that YTM does not have feature parity without a YouTube Music Premium subscription.

With GPM I can listen to my music in the background on my Pixel. But with YTM you need a monthly subscription to do that.

With GPM I can listen to my music on my Sonos. But with YTM you need a monthly subscription to do that. Ars Technica reports that Google Home users will need a YTM subscription too, just in case you forked out money for Google-branded smart speakers.

And it doesn’t matter if this is music that you’ve uploaded or that you’ve purchased from Google. That’s the real kicker for me. I’ve been buying music from Google since 2013 — 669 songs to date, some of them via albums and some of them as individual songs. It’s hard to know exactly how much money I’ve paid to Google for music over the past 7 years, but at $1/song that would be just under ~$100/year. 

I don’t subscribe to music; I still purchase music. More over I’m not going to pay $12/month for YouTube Music Premium to be able to access the music I’ve already purchased. If I wanted a subscription service I would pay $10/month to Spotify. I realize that I am no longer Google’s target audience.

Instead I’ve downloaded my purchased music from Google and am trying out a Plex server. I can listen to music on my phone and Sonos without a subscription of any kind. So far it’s working out well.

Now I just need to figure out who to purchase music from that isn’t Amazon or Apple.