The Best Alternative to Google Play Music

Finally, Google ends its Google Play Music service in 2020. Users can now copy their files to Youtube Music, the follow-up service. Lots of websites and blogs (here or here or here) want to provide you with ideas for a reasonable alternative service and tell you the pros and cons. Well, they try to but lack some important information - let's see why :) 

Google Play Music really has some fantastic features - great app and integration into Android, free upload and management of an own music library (mp3s or flac shrinked to 256 kbit, but this is similar for most services to keep file sizes somewhat small), free download of these files, and an optional paid service for 10$ (which is more or less the prize you pay anywhere for 1 month of music). So yeah, the proposed alternatives suck pretty much: for apple music, you have to get used to a rather closed apple system - download their windows program to upload something, download an apple music player for your smartphone, make an account there, pay pretty much for their music service (which you can, in case of Google Music, get for about 3$ with a VPN)

So why not use the follow-up service Youtube Music? Yes, it looks different. But Google offers you the possibility of copying all of your files to the service, so you can keep your music library. One feature it dows not offer is changing your cover art or any other information such as singer, year of release, etc - so this metadata should be perfect and integrated in the file before you upload (which is easier as in Google Play Music, where the uplaod feature sucked a little). Or you don't give a f*** as the title is anyway correct.

So, any more feature lacks? Yes, our friends tell us we cannot download our music library. But they lie :) it is not possible to download single mp3s when we are for example at a friend's party. But Google offers the possibility to download any information of your account - click here! So we just select Youtube Music, then only select uploaded music library - and in two minutes, Google sends a link with a zip file with all of our music. So yes, you can download your library anytime! 

All the other services like TIDAL or whatsoever completely lack the possibility to upload an own library and theoretically have a completely free service with all of your music. So stay with Youtube Music and be happy :)