Dries My Sack: YouTube Music

Welcome to the next entry in my, ongoing, op-ed. This series is titled "Dries My Sack" and can be compared to the Grinds My Gears segment in Family Guy Presents - Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story. As I find things in life that piss me off, they'll become part of this series. The title for the series comes from a joke my father made while kayaking. I have a "Dry Sack" for keeping things dry during water sports and he made the joke that I should see a doctor. There you go...

A Perfectly fine music service is dead and gone.

You know what really dries my sack?

YouTube Music.

I am a longtime Google fan.  I am a stock holder.  I am typing this on Google owned Blogger via Google Chrome utilizing a Chromebook.  My entire movie collection is digital via Google TV.  My home has 7 Google Home Minis. 2 Google Nest Minis, 10 Google Smart Plugs, 1 Google Hub, 4 Google Chromecasts, and 26 Google Smart Bulbs.  My business contracts are done via Google Docs and Google Sheets and stored in Google Drive.  My transactions are made on a Google Pixel 4 running Google Android with Google Fi service via Google Pay, and my steps are tracked by a smart watch running Google Wear.

And that's just the beginning.

I also have my entire musical library uploaded to Google Play Music.  It's a perfectly usable app that allows me to make playlists, sort my music by genre, artist, album, and title, edit the metadata, playback on a variety of devices, download for offline play, and, up until a week ago, I could ask my Google Assistant to play any part of my collection on any of my devices with a simple voice command.

Enter the birth of YouTube Music;  The biggest mistake since Trump was elected President.

Now, we have been warned for months that YouTube Music would be replacing Google Play Music so I made sure to copy my library over in preparation and I tried it out here and there, noting the bugs and reporting to Google in the hopes that they would fix them all before the changeover completed.

I must be crazy to have thought that.

Here we are, mid October, and Google Play Music is officially defunct and YouTube Music is here to stay.

Unfortunately, YouTube Music is a pathetic shadow of it's predecessor.

Let's start simply...

YouTube Music seems to think they know more about what I want to listen to than I do.  In that they are more interested in my hearing their "expertly cultivated" playlists than MY OWN FUCKING LIBRARY.  Hey YouTube Music!  Here's a fucking tip:  I JUST WANT TO LISTEN TO THE SAME 1000 SONGS I'VE BEEN LISTENING TO SINCE I WAS 15!  Not to mention they have removed batch selection so I have to add or subtract songs individually AND they have removed the ability to search by genre!  UGH!

Let's shuffle the conversation around a bit...

Both services offer a shuffle feature.  Unfortunately, YouTube Music's doesn't shuffle if playing from a downloaded playlist.  What does this mean?  Well, let's say I have a workout playlist with 100 songs in it.  Under Google Play Music, I could listen to the playlist on shuffle every morning during my 30 minute workout and hear a different 10 songs each day.  With YouTube Music, I hear the same damn 10 songs every single day.

Let's take the conversation on the road...

There is no app for Wear OS.  This means I have to carry my big ass phone when I exercise if I want music.

The whole thing has cast an ugly shadow on my listening experience...

I cast from my phone to a variety of smart devices.  This was never an issue with Google Play Music.  With YouTube Music, my cast is interrupted every so often with a warning telling me to continue casting, I have to upgrade to YouTube Music Premium at $10 a month.

FAT.  FUCKING. CHANCE.

I am just trying to be the voice of reason...

This brings me to the most egregious of errors on their part.  With Google Play Music, I could say, "Hey Google, shuffle Morning Mix on Top Floor" and Google would shuffle, differently each time I asked, my playlist called Morning Mix on all devices within the group called Top Floor.  Now if I ask, she responds that in order to do that, I need to pay them $10 a month.

Say it with me...

FAT.  FUCKING. CHANCE.

In what world should I be paying to listen to music I already own on a device I already paid for?  This equates to you buying a boombox in the 80's and a rockin' Paula Abdul cassette and being told you have to return to the record store each month to pay them to listen to it.

And that's what really dries my sack.