YouTube Music
theverge.com
theverge.com
> The one feature I really find lacking in Music is the ability to make playlists, but I know that when it comes to music services I’m hungry for power features that don’t necessarily appeal to the masses
This article is an ad, not a review or analysis of the service.
http://gizmodo.com/youtube-music-is-breathtakingly-pointless...
Saying that it was is a pretty major accusation and, if true, would be a gigantic breach of journalistic ethics.
There's a huge difference between a positive review and an advertisement. Conflating the two is intellectually lazy.
I've not read the article, but it makes sense to remember that 'payment' can come in various forms, not just cash. Access, favors, special privileges granted, etc.
This isn't my purview, per se, but I know there is some concern about this sort of thing, particularly in political reporting which has become much less adversarial compared to the not so distant past.
You're of course unlikely to find many of these concerns voiced very loudly in the 'press.'
Advertisement is a specific term and applying it to all articles that you don't agree with undermines its usefulness.
I have 4 different android devices, which all fully meet youtube's version requirements. This is baffling. I guess it doesn't like that i'm in germany?
Edit: Yep, after installing the APK, the app complains my account is not american. So it's just a very lazy way of region-locking with misleading error messages.
Might not be super clear but the entire store works like that and always has, so it's nothing to do with youtube music.
As an expat, I vastly prefer Apple's approach to all this: if you have a method of payment in one country, you have a completely valid account for that country.
The key is to use a VPN to surface from a US IP address, they are limiting install to GeoIP.
After you have installed it, you can open the app and choose a different Google Account (a non-US one) to use with the app. But it will always do a GeoIP check on opening the app, so you have to keep using the VPN. This allows you to access your existing Google Music and YouTube accounts even though you just installed under a different account.
As for the app, works really well. I like the audio vs video toggle at the top, and that it's picked up on the things I've listened to or watched within Google Music. The auto-advance onto the next video feels more intuitive than the Google Music "Start Radio..." button, and the recommendations are good.
It's also really really nice to have the music play in the background, screen off... and then to make it foreground and at that point it resumes the video, sync'd perfectly. They do seem to be playing optimised audio tracks from videos, not audio tracks.
This is just a better interface for music than Google Play Music which feels too cold and sanitised for something so emotive as music. This stands back a bit, let's the music and video step to the front.
The only catch. I can't pay for it using my UK account. So it looks like I have a couple of weeks to choose whether I want to shift my Google Play Music subscription over to my US Play Account or not. Right now... I'm thinking not, and to wait. But who knows how long the wait will be.
For the curious about bandwidth requirements for HD video over VPN: https://goo.gl/photos/BG7JeTxe8UNbWMGL9
> It's also really really nice to have the music play in the background
Apparently this works on the IPhone but not on Android...
I like a small band called annenmaykantereit from Germany . I cant find their stuff anywhere(Apple,Spotify...) other than YouTube.