Google launched its music service last week and it is the worst of the bunch for turning users into shills. It is adequate, and still my choice for streaming music to my phone, but it is one thing to offer a free service to the “customer” and turn around selling his or her attention to advertisers. I am OK with that. It is another thing to make users be your ad department.
Google music makes it easy to buy and share music with the people in your circles. The problem with those shares is that they are only samples with a link to buy, or you can share the entire song if you purchase it from the Google music store rather than upload it yourself.
But Google music is not the only offender in this department. Spotify and Facebook really want you to use the services together and again Spotify is a product I use and like for streaming music on my computer. To play the music people share from Spotify on their social network of choice you need to become a Spotify user yourself.
Sharing music with your friends should be about turning them on to something cool, amazing or fun, not making another user for the company to sell to advertisers or worse an advertisement for a specific place for your friends to go buy the music that you are listening to.
This is not a problem that is confined to the internet. No, this is part of something bigger the music industry has dumped on us for years. Radio stations are able to sell ads to support playing songs, which in turn are ads for the albums we buy. These in turn are ads for the shows the artists play and even these have been corrupted into opportunities for vendors to sell us food, drinks and T-shirts.
I can live with that. I can avoid commercial radio, I can find music organically, from friends or by researching the influences of the artists I like. Now however, the music providers have found a way to commercialize even my friends’ recommendations.
To make matters worse they make it easy to share. One, maybe two clicks and you have done it.  You have been not just the consumer of their advertising but also the delivery system. For me, this is going to far. I will not link my Spotify account with Facebook. I will not suggest songs via Google music. I will not tell my friends where to shop online.
This does not mean I will stop recommending music, but I will do it the way I always have: via YouTube.
YouTube lets my friends hear the song, read some thoughts on the video or the music. They can listen to the whole thing in their stream or on their wall, and if they don’t want to do that, they can still pop open a new tab and watch the video on YouTube.
Yes I may still be exposing my friends to an ad or two; that can’t be helped when we share links on the internet. What I am not doing is telling my friends where to buy their music. I am not offering my friends up like fatted calves as new customers and users for the music industry.