YouTube Music is finally opening up Chromecast support for everyone. Leaving YouTube Music as Google’s only music app, Google Music will be actively blowing the wind this month. The main feature difference between the two services we are complaining about is the restricted Chromecast support. At Google Music, the casting just worked for everyone. On YouTube Music, casting was banned from people paying for a monthly streaming service. Bring your own music band, this means that if you have your own speakers you want to cast proprietary music, you had no choice but to subscribe to a streaming service, which you do not want.
To this day, however, Google tells us that casting on YouTube music should now work for everyone. Previously, when tapping the “Cast” button, unsubscribed users would get “Subscribe to YouTube Premium” pop-up bits, but now YouTube Music will start roaming our speakers for no monthly fee.
Google Music Shutdown is already well underway. The service is set to close worldwide in October and last week Google stopped uploading music for everyone. This means that while you can still stream, you can’t upload new music to your account. So open casting support for YouTube music is coming a few days late.
Google is trying to whip YouTube music into a solid replacement for Google Music, but it still has a long way to go. YouTube Music began supporting music uploaded in May with a much simpler music-transition process, but the app lacks many features. That support is missing for playing your own music on Google Home (or Nest Audio Dio), and no support for Android Auto Toe. Meanwhile, downloading playlists for streaming flight playback is still lagging behind the monthly fee for streaming music, which makes no sense when you provide music. The app also lacks basic music player features like sorting songs, editing song information, and retrieving smart music playlists like “recently added music”.
On Google Music’s Subredit, user Bloodymas has created a fairly large list of community complaints. Google doesn’t seem to be resolving everyone’s grip before the Google Music shutdown is complete, but it’s working on at least some of them.
