After being a very loud and proud user of Google Music All Access, I have decided to switch back to Google Music’s Free Version and return to iTunes for another year.
All Access was announced at Google’s Developer Conference on May 15, 2013 and i was excited! I had been wanting a great iPhone music player replacement on the android side so i could finally put my iOS devices to rest.
Google Music started out with all the things to lure me in. It had a modern design, a new way of rating songs you like, (The Star ratings on iTunes are mainly unusable), a more reliable cloud product, (iTunes Match stressed me out from time to time), and a new way to manage the music you own. For almost everything i needed it for, All Access provided. The new \”Radio\” feature where it would find songs similar to the song i was playing, made me fall in love with All Access. As someone who doesn’t listen to or watch mainstream media, this feature made music discovery easier for me.\n\n\n\nI had All Access for 4 months. This month +Google Wallet bugged out and decided to cancel all my subscriptions on my account. However All Access continued to function. Technical issues will always occur and I generally don’t hold a company accountable for bugs. I reached out to +Google Play Customer Care via phone, and they stated that the service wasn’t canceled. I then reached out to Google Wallet via phone as well and they stated that it WAS canceled, and that +Google Play would have to resend the subscription to the wallet system in order to re enable the subscription. Again, I dialed up +Google Play and this representative said there wasn’t any way to do that until the subscription was canceled. He assured me I would still be grandfathered into the $7.99 rate i was originally offered. I explained to the representative that i had been reading online and that if my account is canceled in their system i would lose my playlists. He said that this was not the case. I told him i didn’t mind paying $9.99 just as long as my playlists weren’t lost, as i have built massive lists thanks to their service. He again assured me that it wouldn’t.
About 6pm yesterday i loaded up the desktop app to the well designed logo to the left. I then grab my phone and tablet and to my demise, no playlists. Now, the All Access Customer Care department is saying there isn’t any way to get the lists back. I attempted to reach out to +Google Play through +Google+ before and after the cancellation took effect on my account, but there was no response from anyone.
Granted, iTunes (the desktop application) is a pretty bloated app. and yes, I will more than likely spend more money going back to my original way of consuming music. But I can honestly say, that regardless of all the mishaps over the years, i haven’t lost a single piece of content in my Massive library since i started building it in 2005 (8TB of Combined Content). And I can’t say that about +Google Play Music All Access in the 5 short months I had with it.
All and All, All Access was an amazing service, one i would recommend to just about everyone. But i would advise them of letting your account suspend. A Declined Credit Card, A kicked back Carrier Billing issue, or a Google Wallet technical issue will cause you to lose everything you’ve organized.
I would be willing to give the service a try again, if they change the policy about deleting immediately after cancelation. its very very small data to store playlists. And holding someone’s playlist for a short time (lets say 59 days) just in case they return after leaving the service would probably be a better alternative. Implement this, and i’ll return and go back to praising the service wholeheartedly!
Update 9/2/2013: After the creation of this blog post, someone from the All Access department reached out to me via email and offered to call me. The spent about 24 hours and restored my old playlists that were missing citing a known issue with users complaining about missing playlists after a billing issue. As promised I’m singing the praises of Google Music All Access once again!“
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