For me it was the ability to upload my own library and stream it without a subscription, I ended up switching to plex and running my own server for a while but yeah Spotify just has the best deal with no effort so I caved to that especially with a family plan you can’t beat it.
IIRC Play Music was a paid service, it probably had a free tier with ads/commercials, but I definitely paid for it. That’s how I got grandfathered into YouTube Premium (when they launched YouTube Red as it was called it came “free” with the subscription to Play Music) and can’t go back to the free tier or deal with the various hacked clients and ad blockers. It’s been over a decade of ad-free YouTube (except for the sponsor segments everyone does now, I do use SmartTube on my Nvidia Shield to skip those).
For me it was the ability to upload my own library and stream it without a subscription, I ended up switching to plex and running my own server for a while but yeah Spotify just has the best deal with no effort so I caved to that especially with a family plan you can’t beat it.
IIRC Play Music was a paid service, it probably had a free tier with ads/commercials, but I definitely paid for it. That’s how I got grandfathered into YouTube Premium (when they launched YouTube Red as it was called it came “free” with the subscription to Play Music) and can’t go back to the free tier or deal with the various hacked clients and ad blockers. It’s been over a decade of ad-free YouTube (except for the sponsor segments everyone does now, I do use SmartTube on my Nvidia Shield to skip those).
Yeah I think at some point they started subscriptions but you were able to keep your old library from before