Google Play Music

» see play.google.com/music as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

google play music had its turkish moment around 2014. i had an android phone by then on ttnet at home, the play store was the default place to install everything, and the music app was just sitting there as one of the google apps you could not really uninstall. i used the free locker tier for a while to back up my own mp3 collection because 50,000 songs for free felt like an unreasonable amount of cloud storage to give away. the all access subscription was available in turkey eventually but i never paid for it, spotify arrived in '13 and that became the streaming app i actually used.

the service launched as google music on november 16, '11 and was rebranded google play music in march '12 when google was busy renaming everything under the play umbrella. the locker would scan your own collection, match what it found against its catalog, then stream the matched copies back at higher bitrate. tracks the matcher could not identify got uploaded as-is. the all access tier launched at google i/o in may '13 with a 40-million song catalog and competed directly with spotify and rdio without ever really winning that fight in any country i was paying attention to.

the killed-by-google story is the boring one. youtube was building its own music product, and google could not justify maintaining two parallel subscription services that mostly did the same thing. the announcement that gpm would be folded into youtube music came in 2018 with a long runway. the locker model was the part i actually liked, and it did not survive the transfer cleanly. you could move your uploaded files into youtube music, but the integration with your own collection felt second-class compared to what gpm had been doing since '11.

~ the dossier ~

~ the locker ~

the part that mattered to me about gpm was the locker. before icloud music library and before spotify even pretended to support your own files, you could drop 50,000 mp3s into a google folder and stream them back to any device signed into your account. for someone with a hard drive full of files collected over a decade of mp3 culture, this was the cleanest cloud-locker offer on the market. amazon had a similar product. apple had itunes match. neither was as casual about the size limit as google was.

the matching engine was unusually good for its era. it could identify obscure rips and serve back a higher-quality version than what you had uploaded, with metadata cleanup against the gracenote-style catalog along the way. the catch was that the version you got back was not your file, it was google's copy of the same recording. for most people that was fine. for a small group of people who cared about specific masters or live recordings, the matcher's substitutions were a small daily annoyance.

~ how it ended ~

the shutdown was announced in 2018 and rolled out over '19 and '20. the transfer tool let you move uploads and purchases into youtube music with a single button, the playlists and ratings came across as best as they could. on december 3, 2020 the gpm apps stopped working and the web player redirected to youtube music. the locker model did not really make the trip. youtube music supports uploads now, but the workflow is different and the marketing has never made much noise about it.

the gpm logo sat in my app drawer for nine years through phone changes and android version upgrades, and one day the icon just turned into a youtube music shortcut. that is the way google products die. there was no obituary post on the blog, just a help-center page explaining where your library went.

credit to speechless, who wrote in.

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