Why do Google favour Spotify?

I’ve noticed that where Google integrates Music services, it seems to preference Spotify. I’ve seen this on both their clock app and also Waze. Google has two music services of its own (Google Play Music and YouTube Music) but these don’t integrate at all. Why is this? Strange.

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Play Music (which I use) seems to be the primary integration choice on my Google Home, with Spotify as the first alternative, so obviously mileage varies

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That’s a good point. I can use GPM and YouTube music on my Home(s) quite nicely too. Curious about the other apps though.

Possibly because Google’s offerings are in transition. Google play music is being replaced by YouTube music but YouTube music isn’t quite finished yet.

Alternatively, Spotify had paid some money to get good visibility over their competitors.

The Waze BU is kept fairly arms length from Google’s core operations so I guess they are pretty free to develop as Waze sees fit for its user base

Because although they have competing products, they also share a mutual rival so it’s best to work with each other. I’m not sure they favour Spotify - certain teams within Google have just built some nice integrations.

To be honest, Google should have bought Spotify when they had the chance.

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It’s so annoying that the default alarm/clock app integrated Spotify but not GPM/YouTube Music. :persevere: I imagine it’s because Spotify has already done a lot of the leg work required for easy integration?

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I would say they do the complete opposite and prioritise google music.

This. It just seems strange that they’d do that. You invest in Google’s ecosystem and then their own stuff doesn’t work together. Maybe I just expect too much :joy:

Spotify is still the most popular music streaming service, so it makes sense.

To be honest, Google should have bought Spotify when they had the chance.

Please no. As a customer I want to pay a fair price every month and get music and not have my music tastes analysed in order to bring even more cancer ads into my online life.

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Guess you don’t watch YouTube either…

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This was a little while ago so hopefully soon :crossed_fingers:

As someone who heavily uses Google Products I can say (with some frustration) that Google are one of the most fragmented companies out there. They frequently have multiple versions of the same service, and it can be a challenge to find out which is the one to use. Getting any information from Google is also nigh impossible, 90% of the google feature news is from people delving into apps after updates to see what’s changed. You usually won’t hear a word from Google about it.

So aye, the fact that the alarm clock (not available in UK unless you use ‘US English’ as your assistant language) plugs into Spotify and not one of Google music streaming offerings is entirely unsurprising. Apparently Google Play Music will go the way of Google Inbox in 2019, but who really knows.

Another example is Google Duo on Chromebooks. The Duo is available on other third party Chromebooks, but on Google’s flagship (and until recently only) ChromeOS device it is unavailable. Why have Google enabled it on third party ChromeOS devices and not their own hardware? It’s anybodies guess.

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I’m sorry to have to be picky, but I have Spotify integration on my Android alarm clock and everything is set to UK English as far as I am aware.

My opinion is that Google probably knows most prefer Spotify over its own offerings hence why it integrated that into the clock. It would have been pointless linking it to Play Music since it’s being discontinued soon. YouTube music is also more a music video service as I understand so probably wouldn’t work so well with the Clock app.

No, you’re correct. Just click my alarm sound and spotify is there. It’s all very confusing! You can’t tell assistant to create a radio alarm (or at least you couldn’t last I heard/checked).