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Google podcasts is shutting down

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Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#151
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. "Blogs" might be dead -- also, many blogs are still the best content on the internet. Democratizing both the newspaper column and the radio show is great -- so many interesting voices out there.

There was never a time when a popular blogger was offered $200M by a company to move to their platform and continue writing. The situations aren't even close to the same.

The content was never about the $200M and the listeners/readers probably never even cared about helicopters with bags of money.

Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#152
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I feel €15/month is exorbitant amount for what we're getting in return I think it comes down to how often you use the platform. YouTube has been my primary media source for the last twelve years and ads are what paid for that. Now that I can pay $14 (USD) per month to give the people I watch a bit more, have no ads, downloads, and a few other nice little features, it was a no brainer for me. I have always gotte…

YouTube Music is $15/mo YouTube Premium is $19/mo

I've been paying $7.99 a month.

Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube Music is $15/mo YouTube Premium is $19/mo

That seems high but I know pricing can vary significantly across countries. Is that somewhere in Europe for example? Or any government or Apple taxes included? in the US, going through the official website, it shows $14 a month or $11.66 a month if paying for the upcoming year at once. Premium and Music are part of the same product here and I'm not sure if you can unbundle. For comparison, Spotify Premium here looks…

Oh wow, this is a subscription through Apple… I didn’t realize the Apple Tax was so high!

Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you switch to? I tried Tidal, loved the noticeably higher-quality audio, but there were two dealbreakers for me - no crossfade playback (for running) and no downloads to the desktop app (for travelling). I could just about have dealt with no downloads on the desktop app, but they actually removed the crossfade playback a while ago because, according to an official reply on their support forums "it didn't add…

I switched to a combo: For myself, I'm back to a music library that I own. No DRM. For my wife, I signed up for Apple Music. She wants more variety than our library.

Thanks. I've been getting back into the Apple Music app a bit - I have a large library of CDs that I've digitised too, but I've discovered so much on Spotify over the years that I think I'd miss that side of it. I don't really have time to read music websites (and despite reading Melody Maker and NME quite a bit when I was younger) I find most of it overblown.

Like a sibling comment, I now also buy CDs and LPs of albums realeased in the pre-streaming era, depending on which format the album was made for. But I always immediately rip the CDs into FLAC because I'd forgotten how brittle they can be in terms of a slight scratch ruining one or more tracks.

And for more recent stuff that I really like, even if I hear it on Spotify, I try to buy it on Bandcamp or similar, so there's some cash going directly to the artist.

What all that doesn't solve for me is discovery, which I find is significantly better on Spotify than the Apple Music service. (Or the worse audio quality of Spotify compared to Tidal - my test album is always Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin. There's no hiding when it comes to the synth hi-hats at the beginning of Xtal.)

Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#156
post #62

OK, I'm done. I need to migrate my email from gmail. It's going to be long and arduous. Suggestions on providers? Before you ask: No, I do not want to host my own mail.

I recommend fastmail with a custom domain. By using your own domain (not self-hosting) you can migrate to a new provider should you decide you don't like fastmail.

Very much agree on this. It's what made a switch from Google Workspace to Fastmail much easier than it might have been, and gives me confidence that if there's a better alternative to Fastmail I discover later I can jump ship pretty easily.

Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#157
post #62

OK, I'm done. I need to migrate my email from gmail. It's going to be long and arduous. Suggestions on providers? Before you ask: No, I do not want to host my own mail.

Before you look at Fastmail or ProtonMail or Tutanota, take a look at (in no particular order), runbox.com, Mailbox.org, mailfence.com and posteo.de (posteo is the only one in this list that doesn’t support custom domains). They’re all cheaper, support IMAP and are hosted in Europe.

Thanks for this. I looked at mailbox.org before picking Fastmail, but their pricing is a bit much for the relatively small amount of storage, and I just want email, not their office platform, which seems to be a core part of their offer. However, I'd rather be somewhere in Europe than Australia (as I am with Fastmail) for privacy reasons, and runbox.com looks interesting. Do you have any experience with reliability for any of those services?

Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#158
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ads in podcasts is why I left Spotify. Doesn't really seem like premium when the main content I want from them still has ads

I also left Spotify because of podcasts. I did not want to listen to podcasts, and they couldn't get that through their heads, shoving it down my throat, advertising it to me, even though I paid for an ad-free experience. Drove me crazy, so I left.

Companies have redefined advertising to exclude advertising for their own platform (and people will defend this for them and claim that "promotions aren't ads" or something like that).

At this point, we need a bill in Congress to establish that "ads are ads" and that "ad-free must be ad-free".

Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like introducing ever increasing ad loads and removing background playback to a premium tier to create “value” for subscriptions while simultaneously trying to resurrect cable television despite the Internet being a thing, for example? I love how hard people will advocate for their YouTube subscriptions like it’s the best thing ever. YouTube’s recent changes are so Hollywood entertainment exec-esque lately (…

Curiously, the reply to yours calling out all these "YT premium is great" replies as potential Google employees was flagged. Why? It's not an invalid assumption. I err on the side of people have been so sick of YT's badgering that Premium truly feels like a great solution - despite that only being the case because of Google creating the problem in the first place.

Because it violates this site’s guidelines:

“Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.”

Re: Google podcasts is shutting down

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that's where the confusion is coming from. Because that's not what consolidation means.

Google is consolidating their portfolio and allows you to migrate away if that is your choice

See, despite being common corporate speech, this is not what 'consolidation' means. 'Consolidation' means combining multiple things into a stronger whole.

As said, it depends on whether one considers YT Music as a place for the podcasts product to continue living, or a place where customers of the product are suggested to go to "also find podcasts somehow". Considering that Google stops the product and "allows you to migrate away", they don't consolidate, they discontinue.

If I have two horse carriages carrying people to different places and I decide to kill one horse and tell all its passengers to maybe check out the other horse, then I'm not 'consolidating' my horses, I discontinued the life of one of my products.

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