Google Play Music observations for bizarre use
Hi, my name is Paul and I’ve got two kids. Hi Paul. These are just some observations on excessive use of Google Play Music.
For reasons that escape me each kid wants a different color light each night and some music to go to bed by. This has lead to the repurposing of two phone/tablet devices that were gathering dust doing nothing into kiddy music players that interface with some smart LED speaker/lights.
Yes, I have become DJ Daddy Night Night. Don’t laugh.
Now, on each device I’ve synced a playlist locally so that I’m not hammering Google for music over and over again. I’m pretty sure they would wonder why a 44 year old man is absolutely all in on the Trolls Soundtrack if they bothered to look.
I’ve got whatever the Play Music option is that gets me YouTube Red (You Tubered… huh huh,) which means I can stream all day long if I want, and I can share this with my Google Family. This means I can stream six separate streams of music 24/7 from Google Play Music in theory.
What’s interesting that I can’t do is have two devices online under one account that play offline synced music. Well, I can for about two songs and then I get a notice that playback has stopped because another device is casting.
To be clear, I could sign in and stream 24/7 from the 6 Google Family accounts wasting bandwidth, and as far as I can tell this doesn’t affect Google Home in the least as I’ve had streams going while Maggie decided to listen to The Hamster Dance to insanity levels, but it’s interesting.
I’ve also noticed that the ability to repeat a playlist appears missing now. Probably to stop exactly what I’ve been doing.
My guess is this is a combo decision for abuse mitigation – eg. not playing the same song over and over to boost its popularity or payout, not streaming on infinity devices to engage in bandwidth hogging. This leads me to wonder exactly how much money Justin Timberlake has made off of my 4yo at this point in streaming royalties.
Current workaround – airplane mode.
Shall we storm Google’s offices with raised pitchforks and burning torches? Probably not. This is just something I noticed that has become part of Google Play that didn’t used to be. Perhaps it’s only for my high-offline-use accounts.
Plenty of workarounds.
