I pay Spotify for usability and UX. Google Music might be couple of euros cheaper but the UI is worse (especially on mobile). Piracy and saving files to different devices takes time and effort, streaming is easy. Hunting down good quality uploads and creating playlists based on albums on Youtube? No way.

I had to use Google Music as the wifi at my old work, which was supplied by the local uni, had blocked Spotify.

This means I'm pretty invested in it right now, but god damn they just totally fucked up the desktop interface too with a material redesign. Everytime you open it, you have to click the burger icon just to see the menu. You can no longer view your present playlist in a permanent window, only in a popup. I add a lot of artists to my thumbs up playlist on a whim and then listen to it on shuffle, so like to see what I just listened to/is coming up. And now it's loads of clicking instead of an alt-tab. All the artist photos are now inexplicably circles making it hard to distinguish them by scanning.

Google cannot design anything. They keep getting worse, even as they employ designers. Everything they touch recently they make the UX worse in their quest to turn everything into a tablet interface, aka material.

I would agree with this. I have a Samsung tablet from last year (yes, an entire 6 months ago) and in that time Google has introduced the hamburger menu everywhere, and the "swipe from the left" navigation item.

The physical menu button on the device DOES NOTHING in these apps. It's stupid - why not map menu to the hamburger menu? Or are they confused about whether menu should open the hamburger or the side navigation?

When I bought my TMobile G1 (yes, classic eh) it had menu, home, and back. Then, they introduced a "search" button on the HTC Desire and it lasted until the Motorola Atrix I had. Yet in that time, it stopped doing anything in certain apps.

After that, they completely binned it.

Now the buttons are being made even more redundant. I wish they would make their mind up and not rewrite the UI guidelines every Google I/O. It's STUPID.

I think this Samsung is the last Google device I will buy - now that iOS does split screen, I may jump ship (but I will miss this stylus). At least things run smoothly (Google Maps in 3D on a Samsung quad core is jerky and SLOW; it's worse on the 8 core).

Google hasn't been using the menu button for many generations. It went away with the Galaxy Nexus, and since that you've had the Nexus 4, Nexus 5 and Nexus 6. Seeing that they release one per year, that's 4 years ago.

Blame Samsung for still keeping a button layout that doesn't apply to android since the original 4.0 came out.

Very informative, thanks! In that case I will direct my rage at Samsung for including it, but also at lazy app developers who fail to map MENU PHYSICAL BUTTON to the hamburger menu.

Last Samsung I buy I think.

I think a lot depends on what your income level is. If you have any interest in music, having a well curated music service is trivially worth $10/month, particularly to avoid the hassle of trying to track down good tracks of what you are interested in, deal with ads, etc...

And, the good news is that as paid-for-streaming starts to take off, it creates an ongoing revenue model for artists, ensuring that the labels/artists have incentives to create great new music.

And, between Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, Beats/Apple Music, Rhapsody, Rdio, google Music, Apple Radio Stations, Beats 1, iheartradio (ironically, my favorite) - lots of competition.

For some people curation and editorial responsibility is considered a valuable feature. Time spent hunting for freebies is time I could spend otherwise - i.e. saving me time to find the thing I want is something that provides me value that I am willing to pay for.

Radio doesn't have options, and has ads (as does youtube but I can block them). I can't play youtube efficiently and safely while driving, and it's a much higher drain on battery life and bandwidth. My main use case for spotify is driving music, followed by curated playlists while coding or gaming

If you are willing to put up with the ads.

The sound quality on youtube is really bad, the UI is worse and you waste bandwidth on video. It's also missing features such as shuffle play and defining what is in the upcoming queue. It is also a stand alone application so it you don't need to run your web browser.