I’m cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It’s funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway… there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn’t a thing.
I can’t speak specifically to YouTube Music. But Google Music allowed you to upload I think it was 50,000 of your own songs. And at the time it supported really good audio quality.
The app was also simple and clean. I don’t remember seeing all kinds of ads or suggestions for featured artists, podcasts, etc. Spotify seems a lot busier than what I remember with Google Music. That being said I mostly used Google Music to stream my personal library.