I was quite excited about the music streaming service, Google Music. I have been paying $10 a month for this service since last September, and enjoying their curated lists (radio stations) and taking some of the tracks from there that I liked the best and organizing them into playlists of my own. I was using the format of a dozen tracks per playlist (Brian's Google Dozen #X). I saw this as a viable route to maintaining and updating a purchased collection of digital music.
Building playlists is kind of a hobby with me. I spend some time selecting tracks that fit a musical genre, mood, or theme. Then I spend some more time with the play order of the tracks and last fixes to make it sound just the way I want. I don't have any particular musical talent or training, so I am not saying the results are good in any absolute sense, but they are things that end up exactly to my taste.
After all that effort, it was then a surprise when some of my Google Dozen playlists suddenly had only 11 songs, then 10. I am not sure if this was a system glitch, a change in licensing so that Google did not have rights to the song or the same version of the song, or that I crossed the US border. But this is a deal-breaker for me and I am no longer subscribing to Google Music.
I went back to Apple Music, which is Apple's monthly subscription streaming service. I had tried this before, but liked the Google Music interface much better. However, I don't think this is going to work for me either. It has the same kind of curated format as Google Music and you can move the collection into playlists. However, it has the regrettable feature that you cannot tell what music is your own (purchased, for ever) and what is only available to you through the service. This means, songs in playlists you make can disappear as the catalog of their service changes. I will try it for a month, but will probably have to go back to the old fashioned way of buying music I like.
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