Google Assistant update incentivises dropping Play Music subscription
When I got my Google Home the first thing I attempted to get it to do was to play some music from my library, that didn’t work. I then tried to get it to play some content I’d purchased. That didn’t work. Oh well. I ended up getting a Play Music subscription free for three months in order to play with the thing and I liked it so much I kept it.
Having run a high speed internet radio station while I was living in NY I have a lot of music that never made it to the streaming world, even to this date nobody’s gone back and uploaded some of the albums attempting to make residuals. Seriously, I’d have a box of CDs bands wanted me to play and I’d rip ’em, fill out all the track info, stream ’em, and occasionally interview bands in my “studio”.
But Google Home couldn’t play them until, it appears, yesterday. Link takes about 22 seconds to load on a gigabit connection, you’re looking for the last post from Rachel C which was posted yesterday, not the first post which was posted in 2017.
I asked Assistant to play some songs that exist only in my library today, and it did. I’ll point out I didn’t see this feature until I was at the office with only my phone’s Assistant, looking around it appears XDA is saying that it’s rolling out to Home units as we speak.
Woo hoo!
If you’ve been shying away from using Google Home because the music you’ve purchased on other services wasn’t playable, well that’s solved. If you’re a big ol’ pirate who downloaded everything on Pirate Bay’s top 100 for the past ten years, well Google Home’s usable now.
It’s interesting to see my primary incentive for a Play Music subscription is going away. Of course now the kids want to play Kidz Bop Kidz and several other kids artists that didn’t give me CDs to promote back in 98 on the Eclectic iLL, so I guess the subscription probably stays. Especially since I don’t want little hands and a CD player to ever meet.
[There were a few sources for this, however a tip from Frank and XDA were the main ones, although in order it would be a guy I saw on Twitter that I can’t locate his post followed by Frank followed by another two sites that had no info followed by XDA so I think I’ve credited everyone other than the tweet I can’t locate]
