I never used Spotify but I was an early Google Play user, now Youtube Music.
And I'm a big fan of underground 90s, 2000s gangster rap. Living over here in Europe we had to pirate most of it because the stores just didn't carry stuff like Dubee or Killa Tay.
So when I started streaming my old favorite rap tunes I noticed something very interesting. The Google Play copy of a Killa Tay album called Snake Eyes had the same abrupt encoding error as a copy I had downloaded from XDCC many years earlier.
It was basically evidence that Google Play were using the same pirated version I had acquired.
I just checked Youtube Music and sure enough track 2 is still abruptly ended. I now own a physical copy of this album because I've been buying up all my childhood and teenage music, and my copy has the full song obviously.
It's so funny to me that a big "professional" service owned by Google is still 25 years later playing the same pirated music that I grew up pirating and listening to.
Of course this is a very low hanging example because it's such an esoteric artist but maybe there are more examples people haven't found yet.
The early version of Google Play Music asked for your MP3s, so you could have them in the cloud for streaming. I guess they did this for a baseline of data and music and now I wonder if this was an elaborate hack to circumvent legal implications. Should have read the terms back then.
Uh, no, uploaded MP3s couldn't even be deduplicated across different users, because of lawyers. I know because I was there. The team had to ensure having maaaany petabytes of storage on launch day. Maybe the label or whoever owns the rights to the track today uploaded whatever they could find online? One way to verify that is checking if the same issue occurs on Spotify or Apple Music.
Do you have insight into what may have allowed some of the anecdotes others are describing, of bootleg versions being the versions used by Google Music/Youtube Music?
All online music services seem to have borked up copies of Bob Dylan albums that for the Bootleg Series albums with live content are missing the between-tracks bits that on the CDs are stored in the pre-gap.
And I'm a big fan of underground 90s, 2000s gangster rap. Living over here in Europe we had to pirate most of it because the stores just didn't carry stuff like Dubee or Killa Tay.
So when I started streaming my old favorite rap tunes I noticed something very interesting. The Google Play copy of a Killa Tay album called Snake Eyes had the same abrupt encoding error as a copy I had downloaded from XDCC many years earlier.
It was basically evidence that Google Play were using the same pirated version I had acquired.