Tell HN: All your Google Music deleted on February 24th

48 points by chrisacky 5 years ago | 42 comments

I didn't buy that much on Google Music, it was mostly indie, self-published bands/groups who needed a platform, but from 24th All Google Music is being deleted and the platform shutdown.

This is the email I received:

> We'll soon delete all of your Google Play Music library and data

> On 24 February 2021, we will delete all of your Google Play Music data.

> This includes your music library, with any uploads, purchases and anything you've added from Google Play Music.

> After this date, there will be no way to recover it.

> You can download your Google Play Music library and data with Google Takeout, or transfer it to YouTube Music.

> As a reminder, with one click, you can still transfer your music library, including uploads, playlists and recommendations, to YouTube Music before 24 February 2021.

ndiscussion 5 years ago |

Daily reminder: Piracy is not about price.

https://archive.is/tFp19

hackflip 5 years ago | |

I regularly pirate movies that I've already purchased 2+ times (eg I already own on both VHS and DVD).

The friction of walking into another room to find my physical copy is greater than just downloading it on my laptop.

londons_explore 5 years ago | |

Piracy isn't only about price.

naebother 5 years ago |

This is why I'm still discovering and managing my mp3s like it's the 00s (warez/torrents). Never know when it's all going to be shut down. These services are still good for discovering similar music, but always have local copies.

speedgoose 5 years ago | |

You could always use a service not managed by Google. Spotify for example has been around for years and will not close anytime soon.

smichel17 5 years ago | | |

Spotify does, however, sometimes lose their license to songs on the service. Maybe not often, but it's happened to me enough that I only rely on Spotify for discovery now -- when I know I like something enough to keep listening to it, I buy it.

qart 5 years ago | | |

I agree with this recommendation. When we are dealing with a company as large as and has as diverse a portfolio as Google, we must be heedful that as soon as they find one of their products troublesome in one way or another, they will shut it down. With a company like Spotify, they will fight for its survival as if their life depends on it.

With Google, it seems to be, "This was a fun experiment. We'll try something else now."

For music, I think the best option is to find indie labels who let you download and keep stuff DRM-free. Spotify is probably the best option for mainstream music.

napsterbr 5 years ago |

They deleted my curated playlist for programming while I was a paying customer and with zero warning. I just moved to a new service (and in parallel keep my playlist locally, with good old mp3 files).

Thanks for the warning, but unfortunately when it comes to Google one must never be surprised when their data is no longer accessible.

junon 5 years ago | |

I need a new service reccomendation that isn't GMusic or Spotify, neither companies of which I would like to support financially.

I don't mind paying for a hosted service as I don't have the time nor the energy to manage my own multimedia service and would like to have good reliability when out and about.

Any ideas?

merlinscholz 5 years ago | | |

I ditched Spotify for Apple Music last year (due to several issues with Spotify). The only thing I miss so far is a good web player. Apple Music offers one, but it crashes way too often. The iOS and even the Android app work just fine. Also, the price (at least here) is the same for both platforms.

stonogo 5 years ago | | |

TIDAL and Deezer are both quite good.

erikbye 5 years ago | | |

My ipod has never failed me. It stores and plays music.

samwestdev 5 years ago | |

Why they deleted your playlist? Copyright issues?

napsterbr 5 years ago | | |

Unlikely, given it only had songs available in the platform (i.e. I had not uploaded any songs myself).

To be more technically accurate, the playlist itself was not deleted, the ~600 songs in it were removed from the playlist.

wilde 5 years ago |

Is this why they restructured as Alphabet? So they could transfer products back and forth between divisions and get promoted without building anything new?

8bitsrule 5 years ago |

When you get 'your data' ... which you 'purchased' (CDs last longer) ....better check through it to see how many Google links they stuck into it. (Ten years ago, they filled my Blogspot 'download' with them. Syonara forever, chumps.) Note that they want you, the purchaser, to transfer the library to another of their sites. They could do it (considering you've been a 'customer'). Cause they're moving their snake oil act on to the next town.

stephenr 5 years ago |

Why is anyone surprised when an advertising company stops supporting the flavour of the week side projects?

For the final quarter of the 2020 financial year, ~81% of Alphabet's revenue was from advertising.

They don't break things out much in their financial reports, it's essentially "Google Services" (the only profitable entry), Google Cloud, "Other bets" and corporate. The final three all lose ~$1B+ a quarter.

In the only breakout that has a profit (the vaguely named 'Google Services'), 87% of the revenue is from advertising. There's no indication of what % of the profits are from search, the "apparently not advertising" part of that breakout generates 13% of the revenue, but might easily be generating just 1% of the profit.

So, once again: Google is an advertising company. Everything else is a little side act, and just as likely to be dropped, because Ads are the only thing Google has ever worked out how to make money from.

d0gbread 5 years ago |

I know the general feel with Google is "they'll shut this down too" and correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks to be more of a rebranding/merge save for the one click to port everything and lose nothing.

If that's true I just wanted to call it out since comments so far read like they're deleting content you've purchased with no recourse.

flipcoder 5 years ago |

"The YouTube channel you're currently using isn't supported for the Google Play Music transfer."

Uhh... ok...

wilsonfiifi 5 years ago |

If you can afford to, just get a Synology NAS. Their audio station app [0] works quite well across devices.

[0] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/audio_station

kderbyma 5 years ago |

I have been removing all my paid Google services one by one. it's a long process but so far I have managed my email, my drive and cloud, my streaming video service, and my webhosts and got repos.

everything is self hosted and runs better than Google half the time. I have a map plugin to use openstreet maps instead of Google maps, and I have everything running in a plug n play form factor. just plug into internet - wait 10 minutes for DNS to propagate - boom.

XCSme 5 years ago |

I'm sad to see Google Play Music go, I loved it.

I am now using YouTube Music, but it's a completely different product and a lot worse than Play Music. The "radio" in function in GPM was amazing, but in YouTube music it just randomly plays songs you listened too, so it combines rock songs with meditation songs, it's a mess.

JoshCole 5 years ago |

Not only that, but when you export to YouTube Music from Play Music they give you the same experience as you would have had you not bought the music on Play Music. They make you watch ads to see the content you purchased and transferred. I'm sure this bug looks great in terms of revenue.

cercos 5 years ago | |

I transferred and i cant find where it all is on my youtube

JoshCole 5 years ago | | |

I suggest trying the Google Takeout tool.

muzani 5 years ago |

It's always funny when someone says that a product is going to be around just because big, stable Google made it.

Well I'm going to avoid buying more things from Google Books and Google Movies for a while. It's a little strange they didn't automatically transfer the music to YouTube Music.

snypher 5 years ago |

My 'Thumbs Up' list appeared as likes on Youtube so I used a tool to download them all as mp3.

bagacrap 5 years ago |

when could you buy music on Google Music (itunes style)? I was only aware they stored user music in the cloud and then later started a subscription streaming service.

snissn 5 years ago |

Ugh this is my biggest concern about Google cloud

fiftyacorn 5 years ago |

You can download an archive from takeout

abanks96 5 years ago |

Would it affect my music player

Dr_Staff 5 years ago |

but, "don't be evil"

itsthecourier 5 years ago |

You cannot trust any google new product, there is always the real danger of them cancelling the project. Having a proprietary cloud, lots of engineers and good planning, I still cannot wrap my head around them killing services