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.
From what I can tell, the core issue with YouTube music is that it is restricted to the same API end points as default YouTube. Their api for playlist management just sucks and a lot of client side caching and workarounds are required to make it at all feel okay to use.
True random is hidden. They auto play videos and/or rape my data with downloads when I specifically tell it not to.