HACKER Q&A
📣 RhysU

Google Music alternatives for people that buy music?


The GOOG is forcing a transition from Google Music to YouTube Music at year end. The former has always freely allowed me to background stream the songs that I have bought over the years. After the transition...

> Background play is only available to paid users of YouTube Music. However, the free version of the music app allows background play for your uploaded songs and streaming on smart devices with Google Assistant. Don't forget that you can still enjoy background play and radio in the Google Play Music app until later this year.

(I cannot find this detail in any article about the change. Only in an announcement emailed to me.)

Can anyone recommend a hosted-but-offline-capable, you-own-your-music, desktop-and-Android service that will let me avoid both YouTube and the Google Assistant ecosystem? I am happy to pay a couple of bucks for some party to securely host my music with a decent app.

  👤 gaspoweredcat Accepted Answer ✓
Plex or a similar service would potentially meet your needs however im not sure if it supports google music, they do have tidal integration and ive used it to stream my own self hosted flac files back when i had unlimited data and it worked pretty well,

if memory serves i streamed both from files stored on google drive and on my home PC with it (i just have a huge SD card now so i just keep files local rather than stream

👤 giantg2
Amazon will allow you to play the songs you buy online and download them. The downloaded songs could be played on your desktop or Android. Probably not as helpful as being able to play them anywhere and sync to your offline device. Although I think Amazon's music service might let you do this, but I'm not sure. I just stick with the oldschool downloads.
👤 theandrewbailey
Bandcamp allows streaming and downloading purchased music. You might also want to look into a DLNA server that you can access locally and remotely.

https://bandcamp.com/

👤 viraptor
Maybe something like https://funkwhale.audio/ ? The only thing I'm not sure about is if it cached for offline playing.