Google Play Music Reviews

by Amirness

Great service. Terrible iOS app. It fundamentally can't play music reliably even when the music is downloaded on the phone I.e. not streaming.

GooglePlayMusic 's been buggy for some time. It used to be better but has steadily deteriorated. I waited patiently for this new release and the longer it took to arrive the more hopeful I was that they'd fix it but this release seems at least as bad as the last. For a company such resources this seems like an amateurish attempt at an iOS app. Or someone is trying to make it terrible on purpose so that I switch to Apple Music. I wonder what the product manager and QA team are up to when their app can't even play a song all the way through? Downloaded songs will stop playing even in offline mode - just today a downloaded song stopped 4 times. Again, these are songs that are on my phone not streaming. It's mostly a mystery why songs stop but at least some have to do with the radio environment. Any time the cellular radio switches mode or the phone switches to wifi the song stops. In NYC it's a busy radio environment with frequency cell handover, and forget using GooglePlayMusic on the subway - even in "Dowwnload only" mode. On wifi at home it mostly works but that's not when I need it to work. My gramophone has that use case covered.

Super disappointing that this release didn't address the long standing playback issues.

by Rvb25

Extremely glitchy with Google Play Music (and Siri). I have the paid subscription of Play Music, but GooglePlayMusic in Apple Car Play will no longer display any information (playlists, songs, now playing, etc). It’s just a black screen (the music will play and I can see the songs only on MyLinks “iPod” screen, not Car Play). I tried uninstalling GooglePlayMusic and resetting MyLink in my Silverado to default settings, while also manually disconnecting all services from each other. That did not fix the problem. I will also ditto some of the Siri complaints and take it a step further. If Siri isn’t properly prompted, it will freeze all volume controls in my Silverado including the volume knob and the steering wheel volume controls for my entire radio (not just Apple Car Play). Nothing will fix this issue until I am completely out of the car, turn it off, and come back at least 15 minutes later for me to get control over my radio back. This hasn’t yet happened to me on a “long drive” for more than an hour, but I’ve been stuck for at least half an hour in a frozen volume purgatory (can’t adjust up or down). Between Apple and Google, get your ish together. This is just embarrassing for both of you as multi billion dollar companies.

by Nikkishelb

I used to love Google Play Music because it was free and easy, I had my usuals to listen to and I loved all the music that popped up. Perfect for what I use GPM for; driving, showers, and hair and makeup music. But, now there seemed to be a new update that has really messed everything up. Now when I play music after the first song it stops playing music until I open my phone and go to GooglePlayMusic where it starts an ad. 😤 The least you can do is make sure the ads play seamlessly with the music while I’m driving. I thought maybe this was a glitch and after the first time it would just play like usual with the ads, but NO. With EVERY AD there is a stop in the music where I need to open my phone and GooglePlayMusic in order to start the ad and then finally continue with the music. Why would you make the ads this way? You’re causing problems with your free listeners and why? Just to try to get them to buy your subscription? If I wanted to get a subscription I definitely wouldn’t choose GPM, especially if they keep this up. How does it look to make free listeners become distracted drivers just to try to get them to buy the premium? Or flood the bathroom while they try to fix their music? Stupid. FIX YOUR AD BUG!

by Ride8575

How does a company with so much smarts get this soooo wrong!! I don't want to listen to someone else's playlist or mix! The internet allows me to ditch radio--why else would I invest the time uploading the music I bought?? I suppose pushing new music to me is the deal you had to make with the record industry robber-barons. Ok, I'll cut you slack there. But I can't forgive this abysmal iPhone user interface. To be forced to scroll through those useless bubble images to find an artist is downright user-antagonistic! When I am looking at My Library, I can see a grand total of 4 artists or albums per screen. When I click an artist, I can only see the first two (2) of their albums because the top half of the screen is showing me a picture of the band it pulled from somewhere. I don't need pictures! Album covers are awesome when they are a foot square and made of real cardboard. They are decidedly not awesome when reduced to a postage stamp to fit on a 2" x 4" display. A simple text listing is all that is needed (think original iPod). It's faster and more elegant. Really hope someone is listening.

by Trevboxe

I’ve been insanely loyal to google play music for a good deal of years now, always thought the expense was worth every penny. But since switching to an iPhone it’s been an absolute nightmare. Even though I’m set up for reoccurring payments it keeps switching me to a free based account and completely deleting everything I’ve downloaded from the past few years from my library with no discernible way to get any of it back. Renewing my subscription was a serious task as no matter what I’d do to update or search through GooglePlayMusic , it gave 0 ways to let me pay for a subscription! I do not own a computer so had to get a friend to lend me theirs. After double checking it would be a reoccurring payment, it turned out the next month the same thing happened and I’m traveling abroad and so have 0 access to a computer. Not only that I can’t even purchase individual albums or songs. Before this GooglePlayMusic glitched and refused to download any new music, while I still had my subscription. Definitely going to switch to a different streaming service, this is ridiculous.

by Kittehmon

The organization for GooglePlayMusic is a bit confusing and feels less user friendly than other apps. There are multiple ways to navigate GooglePlayMusic but can be confusing when you first start using it. It’s a good app, but I think alternative music apps are better.

The main issue that I have is when I add songs to My Library, many of the recently released songs/albums end up getting deleted. Does anyone else have this issue? There’s no way for me of knowing which dogs were removed from my library until I end up searching randomly for that song because I want to listen to it. Not sure if it is a licensing issue of some sort, but it consistently happens to me. We have a family plan, and everyone on our plan has experienced the same thing. One of our users only had about 25 songs in their library, and after a month, it was reduced to 3 songs. If you have a large library of saved songs you like, you’ll never know it gets removed until you search for it.

Personally, I like to just shuffle all my songs in My Library when I’m driving or working, so I never really know when songs get removed. But I occasionally wonder why certain songs don’t get played. I later discover why after I search for the song and see that it was removed from my library.

by 426m

Okay, I’m still using this service. But, gotta say, this really sucked major time, and support was absolutely no help at all. Spent an eternity on the phone to be told there was nothing to be done except to download everything all over again. My library was emptied completely of all music except for one artist and one song by one other artist, which I consider completely unacceptable!!! I had a massive accumulation of music and I use music A LOT, for many things, including work and travel. Getting all my favorites again is going to take a lot of time and I’m really angry about this situation and how it was handled. I feel like reaching out for help was a waste of time, and even worse, if you’re going to offer a service, make sure that something this major DOES NOT HAPPEN. I understand technology has bugs, and I would have probably been more patient and understanding if they at least acknowledged the problem and were working on a solution, but I was essentially told that it was a situation they were not familiar with, and I was responsible for it myself. Really??!!??!!

by Smychavo

Google Play Music has a great selection of tracks and radios stations to choose from, and should have more than enough to suit anyone’s musical tastes. Additionally, audio quality is not a problem, each song sounds crystal clear, despite being a given more often than not for music streaming services. However, there are many little nuances in the UI that bogs down the whole experience. Searching through menus feels choppy, and even delayed at times, as if GooglePlayMusic as a whole is unoptimized for iOS. Even worse, is how power-hungry it is. Every time I open GooglePlayMusic to switch to another album, or playlist, I find my phone lose several percent within minutes of just using it. However this power consumption issue does not occur during background use, thankfully. Overall, GooglePlayMusic feels clunky, and no amount of UI changes, or additions will change that until Google fixes the optimization issues within GooglePlayMusic . At best, GooglePlayMusic works like any music-streaming service. At worst, it is a choppy, power-hungry mess that’s sure to frustrate any user.

by Disruptor2010

Keeping it short and sweet, GooglePlayMusic works pretty well overall. The only issue I run into is with CarPlay and GooglePlayMusic. While the music works fine, you can access all your playlists, etc., two bugs are present. The first is that it doesn’t always show my “Now Playing”. When I click on it sometimes it just sits there at the same screen and freezes, never going to now playing. If I reboot the Google Play Music app or the phone itself, then it usually fixes itself and shows the “Now Playing” screen with what Google Play Music is playing. The bigger issue, however, is whenever I am using the Google Play Music app I lose all functionality for Siri through CarPlay. The icon of Siri shows up if I activate it, but you can’t speak and have it recognize your voice. Once Siri “beeps” so you know to start talking, no matter what you say it doesn’t recognize your voice and just sits there. Then, it stops the voice input thing and goes right back to the song that was playing. It’s quite frustrating/annoying. The moment you leave GooglePlayMusic and go into, say, Apple Music or something else it works fine. It’s only when you are using Google Play Music and music is playing. Please fix this and it goes to 5 stars :).

by AlexanderDaniel

Play Music is and always will be the only music app I ever use. It’s always worked how it needs to and is simple to use, with great quality content. BUT, I don’t know if it’s just the iOS app, but it seems like it gets buggier after every update. I have a lot of problems when I’m trying to use GooglePlayMusic with my google home. Most of the time it won’t even connect to it when I want to cast music. When I try to delete a song from a playlist, it instead deletes a different one that’s a couple songs up and the one I originally tried to delete stays there, and I can’t get rid of it. And something I noticed today, if I try to select ‘play next’ on a song while I’m listening to music, it stops the music completely and a whole other song from a completely different playlist is selected and shows up on the screen. AND now when I listen to a playlist on shuffle, it plays one song, and then the music stops after that and doesn’t continue playing the rest of the playlist. It seems like the more you try to fix something that doesn’t need fixing, the worse GooglePlayMusic gets.

by MrBStill

I love the Play Music app way more than iTunes or Apple Music. I have use Google play and play music for a long time. But once I got a new vehicle with the CarPlay actually or feature the Google play music has quite often caused issues. Whether it was now playing this song or delaying to be pulled up in GooglePlayMusic or stating there is not connection when trying to pull up playlist. Majority of the time I am using my actual phone to start play music from a playlist or simply the library. I have seen other reviews with the same response, so I know I am not the only one. I’m sure part of the reason is because I am using an Apple phone with google play music. But also using the CarPlay feature seems to support more iPhone features than Google features. Even still I would prefer to use Google play music rather than the Apple Music. Excited for when there has been and update sent out for this issue to be resolved.

Honestly, this is the only reason for a 3 star rating. It’s pretty important! Removing that dilemma; EASILY A 5 STAR RATING.!.!

by Paul Navajas

This is the best music app out there currently, but it’s not without flaws. It has all kinds of bugs in CarPlay. For instance, when I try to access my downloaded playlists, it tells me “getting music,” and stays stuck there until I give up and access it through my phone. Also, songs regularly have interference, as if I was playing a scratched record, even though the songs have been downloaded (ie: it’s not due to poor streaming quality). Lastly, the font is so ridiculously small and there’s no way to change it because it’s not compatible with Apple’s software. Who’s fault that is,I have no idea—but it’s annoying.
What I like about GooglePlayMusic is that I can create radio playlist and then download them. This allows me to listen to tons of new music without having to pay to stream it. This is a feature Apple’s app doesn’t offer.
I hope Google will further develop GooglePlayMusic, although they don’t seem to push out updates very often.

by 959Ren

This is really the only music app I use. I, personally, like how it works, but that's because I've been using it for years. It's not the same for a new user; the layout is easy to get confused with.
I have had to deal with issues with deleting songs from my playlists. Trying to delete one song will delete the song one, two, sometimes even three songs above it. It comes and goes, but it's still a reoccurring problem that I've had for the longest time, and when it comes around, I often lose songs for good, because there's no way I could keep track of all 300 of them. And, though I have 300 songs, I may end up listening to some more than others because the Shuffle option isn't that great.
Play Music is also pretty buggy-- the panels that come up for adding songs will sometimes jump across the screen. Speaking of, I do wish that there was an option to simply add a bunch of songs to a playlist all at once rather than one by one.

by Itsmedani

Overall I think Google Music is the best judicial app due to the playlist quality (I used to love Songza back in the day, which was acquired by Google Play Music). So the music is great, but now, there are 2 issues :

1. The ads don’t auto play, so a playlist will stop playing for an ad, the ad doesn’t load, but when you click play or pause the ad is frozen. The user then needs to close out GooglePlayMusic and reopen, only for this to happen again next time an ad block comes on.

2. You can’t contact support directly regarding issues. They don’t seem to provide a place to contact support for any other issues besides the ones already identified in their menu.

by Findingdoriat40

I had GooglePlayMusic on my phone, on my iPhone, while it was still in iOS app. Don’t ask me to remember the name of GooglePlayMusic , I just remember receiving an email that it was going to be Google play as of January 1 and again don’t ask me what year it was either😊 I love the way Google play place through my speakers, while I’m in the car. I have a 2006 Honda Civic, so as you can imagine some of my speakers don’t work. But listening to GooglePlayMusic, instead of fruit named applications, Google play definitely takes the cake. The only thing I would change is that, if you would just start the radio station with the person, persons, group, act whatever.... start the song someone is REQUESTING FIRST. They are requesting that SONG that particular TIME and for a PARTICULAR REASON (NEEDED it THEN)and most of the time, they don’t even get to hear the song the request that started the station.....!And that is a BUMMER!!