I now listen to the majority of my music on Youtube. Most of the songs I want to listen to are there. For free. And legally.
It kills me that Google, owner of Youtube, would not directly integrate Youtube and Google Music. I can only assume this is once again a limitation imposed by the RIAA. Sigh.
YouTube and Google Music are separate product teams. Google Music is run through Android.
Of all the bone headed product decisions made at Google, the fact that Android owns Google Music makes me say "WHY?????"
Its not an RIAA limit (and somehow, you all extend much more power to the RIAA than they have in these matters). It's a Google endemic product org issue.
i think the difference is that for example vevo has ads supporting the music you listen/watch through the youtube channel. As of now there's not the ad alternative through google music.
as someone else said they did announce youtube integration through artists hub as well as linking to purchasing the track from youtube. http://music.google.com/artists/ - at the bottom is screenshot of what it will be like.
Music labels and other such organizations extort huge piles of money from YouTube for the "privilege" of hosting those songs. The pile of ads you see along with those videos go to paying that extortion.
I'm curious how you would have them integrate. Google announced during the event that they were working with YouTube to allow artists to sell tracks directly against their YouTube channels.
What else would you do?
EDIT: Actually, the answer is kind of obvious now that I've pondered it a little bit. We can only hope that a deeper integration is in the pipeline.
Grooveshark has some significant improvements related to Youtube - songs each have their own pages with a Video section, and you can click to play Youtube videos in a modal window. It's in their 'preview' site at the moment.
You do have a Youtube music player in google+ now, though. But yeah, this is definitely a record labels' decision ultimately. I'm surprised they even went along with the artist hub.
I don't know how people listen to music on Youtube. The audio quality on those videos at less than 720p is unacceptable. Even people that walk around listening to 128kbps mp3s can tell when I ask them to swtich from 360/480 to the 720p stream.
There is noticeable difference between 360p and 480p stream on Youtube already. They somehow managed to degrade that much for little bitrate difference.
I like the artist hub, and streaming / syncing offline of my library. But I really don't like the absence of a subscription option to listen to whatever I want. I can't imagine paying nearly the price of one month premium rdio or spotify service for a single album anymore. If they are going to charge per album, they really need aggressively low pricing like lala.com did for "unlimited web plays" (~$1 per album).
the artists hub, and sharing.. are really the killer features of this release. Also the fact they are allowing artists direct control, like distributing concerts and any other tracks they'd like to share is a pretty awesome feature.
Artist hub is sort of awesome. As classical musician, I'd be limited to uploading only public domain music. Anything modern would require licensing agreements, how would Google handle that?
How will they handle things like sampling and/or remixes? Are those considered original works? (Generally, no)
Not saying artist hub isn't a cool feature, I'm just not sure how cool it is. More information required. Then again, there are not many classical musicians interested in using modern distribution technologies.
I am going through a painful process of spending $25 on iTunes Match, waiting for it to complete matching, then finding the purchased DRM iTunes tracks, deleting them and re-downloading them so that I have DRM-free 256Kbps tracks.
Most of the songs in my library are non-drm (mp3) and it still took about 18 hours to do steps 1 & 2 (indexing & ?) across 22k songs. Music is stored on a (slow) network attached drobo.
The 5100 songs (25%? Crazy!) that aren't already up there are taking another 24 hours but I assume this is bandwidth dependent.
Crucially, this is all happening in the background, hasn't required my intervention at all, doesn't disrupt using itunes, and once it started uploading everything that it didn't have to upload was immediately available on other devices.
A pretty solid experience, IMO.
Anyone know what happens when the library hits 25k songs???
You probably know better than me, but I thought the 25k limit was for songs in the "uploaded" category (i.e. your 5100 songs). IOW, you would still be far from the limit.
Last time I checked, it looked like there were plenty of non-DRMed tracks that aren't (or at least weren't) eligible for upgrade.
My wife stopped buying DRMed music as soon as it was possible and upgraded every DRMed track iTunes could find and we still discovered that about 5-10% of her tracks were DRMed when we did the great Amazon Cloud Drive upload.
So when is Google Music going to be added to the Data liberation page? https://plus.google.com/settings/exportdata I would really hate to have all my songs be held hostage in Google Music.
Well data liberation doesn't say that they have to act as a drop box for you. If you have full control of your music to begin with to upload, that's pretty much liberated by the very definition of the term.
Music Plus extension for chrome allows you to retrieve tracks, and I'm quite sure there is an equivalent for firefox. It's not automatic, but it's something
You know the question the VCs always ask: "What if google decided to attack your market, what would you do?" I guess it's a sad day for a couple of promising startups.
Does anyone have a good example of this actually happening? I can think of countless small companies that were shuttered soon after a much larger company horned in on their business.
I can't think of a single example of a company that actually became more popular and relevant when the same thing happened.
Google and Microsoft have a huuuge list of projects they jumped into, and failed, leaving the competition stronger than before. All sorts of half-baked apps and ideas - from Google Knols to Microsoft Frontpage.
(Yeah, okay, Adobe isn't exactly a small company. But they're a lot smaller than Microsoft, but Dreamworks has consolidated its position, and Microsoft killed off Frontpage...)
I was particularly amused to see Google and the music execs on stage for a product announcement on the same day that a Google legal team was Congress's whipping boy for the SOPA hearing.
Following the link took me to a page demanding that I agree to additional terms of service first, but dragging that window out of the way revealed the indication that Google Music won't work without Flash, so I didn't bother going any further. More sites should provide that kind of information before signup; thanks for that.
Hopefully they'll create a non-Flash version at some point in the future, at which point I look forward to trying this.
We've used flash for everything for ages. Hell, if you look at the competition Deezer is in flash. I know the tendency these days is for HTML5 and against Flash but really? Aren't you trying to be a hipster here?
Hardly. I use ClickToPlugin to improve general website performance which breaks Google Music, and I have to completely disable it to use the Google Music web player.
As a result, 100% of my Google Music use is now on my iOS device through the 3rd party gMusic app. It's so obnoxious to offer only the Flash version considering they already coded and offer an HTML5 player, just not to desktops.
We used asbestos for ages too, because it got the job done, and we didn't bother looking for alternatives to that until we had to.
HTML5 has gained ground against Flash for a reason, and I certainly didn't choose it for popularity. I use and prefer open software and open standards, and Flash doesn't provide either one.
If the Flash player ever becomes open, I'll probably install it for convenience, but I'd still use Flashblock and prefer sites based on HTML5 over sites using Flash.
well, <audio> had never been an advantage html5 has had over flash :) It's been pretty bad both in spec and especially in the implementations (edit: but finally improving!)
That said, someone told me they got google music playing in a UIWebView on iOS, so there must be some fallback mechanism.
i think the issue is with content protection and I believe with ios they have a client side drm protection. What legal music services aren't using flash for the only reason of digital content protection ?
Every time I see a cool announcement like this one, I'm painfully reminded that Germany is 10 years behind in every possible way when it comes to digital entertainment. I am nor jealous, just really sad.
Love how Chrome popped a warning that not all content on the page is secure, asking whether to load it or not. Don't load option was recommended... LOL!
First, google offers broke browser back button when it was launched [1]. And now this. Google does not know how to build a good web app; and does not know how to get search work in Andriod Market. What universe are we living in?
Yea, I used Hotspot Shield and could sign up just fine. Then I used Market Enabler on my rooted Android and got the Music APK through the market. Works like a charm.
It kills me that Google, owner of Youtube, would not directly integrate Youtube and Google Music. I can only assume this is once again a limitation imposed by the RIAA. Sigh.