I'm still a little bummed that I had (given away freely) access to a bunch of albums on Microsoft Groove Music and didn't notice they were vanishing / forgot to download them before the service vanished. Props to Takeout/Play Music for making my songs available for download as a ZIP file, I think.

Play Music was often a totally baffling experience.

If I wasn't paying them money and wasn't enrolled in any subscription, what happens when I type the name of a song I don't "own" into the Play Music app? Sometimes it starts playing the song; sometimes it starts playing ads, then fifteen seconds of the song, then silence; sometimes it starts playing the song, then random other songs somehow related to that; sometimes it suggests a "radio station" (?) of music similar to that song, and sometimes playing that station does nothing, or sometimes it plays a song and tells me I need to buy a service to hear more songs, or sometimes it plays that song, then an ad, then another related song, then an ad, then stops playing songs altogether and the app just doesn't play any music while showing me a UI that says it's trying to load and play a song.

One time I subscribed to a free trial of the Play Music streaming service and listened to a bunch of radio songs for a long time and thumbs-up liked them and I think this tailored me to hear more songs like the ones that I had liked, and that was pretty cool, I think. I could even see all my "thumbs up" songs later and replay the ones I liked! Then I paid for that subscription for a while, and then it lapsed, and then I could still see my thumbs-up songs but I couldn't play them anymore because I wasn't a subscriber, except sometimes picking some of them would play, and then sometimes it wouldn't. Boy I spent tens of hours, maybe hundreds, listening to Play Music songs and thumbs upping them this way. I've totally forgotten that experience and how baffling it was until just now.

Basically I could not figure out how to play music in Play Music.

Except for music that I "owned". In my Google Play Music collection, I "owned" some albums that I don't ever remember buying or "buying" for $0 and have no record or receipt of ever putting into my playlist. I looked, I looked for the transaction history about how these albums and songs entered my account, and I just could not find them at all.

One example was, um ... let me see if I can find it, oK I can't look it up in the Play Music app anymore because it's been decommissioned but I can open the YouTube Music app and look, hmmm okay, no songs in there? Oh, right, I need to sign out of YouTube account 'mherdeg' (mherdeg@gmail.com) and into YouTube account 'mherdeg@gmail.com' (mherdeg@gmail.com) because the Play Music=>YouTube Music Transfer Process only supported sign-in-with-Google YouTube accounts? which is not the kind of account I normally use in YouTube and not the one where I keep all my other playlists and listening history? Huh. Okay, switched to that other identically named account which is an empty shell. There's all that transferred music.

Right, so looking at that in the category called "uploaded", somehow just to pick one example, I can listen to an album which is an album I used to "own" in Play Music and I have absolutely no recollection of asking for it, the trippy psychedelic album "Bloom and Decay" by a band called "Giant Cloud" based in New Orealns? Which is fantastic music but I have no idea why I have the rights to listen to it or where it came from into my Play Music collection. There must have been some promotional offer of a whole bunch of $0 albums a few year ago?.

Truly it is like some kind of fever dream.

Oh, and back when Play Music worked, trying to play the songs I "owned" was very confusing on a new phone. What I would do was set up my brand new Android phone, sign in to my Google Account, then open Play Music and notice there were no songs. I would search for a song title from one of the albums I "owned" and it would show me the confusing song/radio/subscription streaming service experience mentioned beforehand, with no indication that I had access to this music. A quick Web search eventually found that I needed to toggle a setting to sync my Play Music music into Play Music, and after I toggled this setting and made sure wifi was on and closed and reopened the app I saw my songs, and then I could play them.

I did love love love Play Music for letting me download all my albums and play that music offline. In "offline mode" the experience was awesome for, you know, playing songs. Except that sometimes on a new phone it wouldn't actually download music, with a notification saying that songs were being downloaded but zero visible progress in the app after tens of minutes, and I couldn't figure out why, but usually rebooting the phone and waiting a while worked.