ABGT (Above & Beyond Group Therapy) is no longer a podcast, no longer a free radio show to listen to. Instead, a 15 min highlight will be offered on podcast apps/sites and you will need to listen to the full show on music streaming services. This has caused quite a stir among the community.
What we’ve seen so far is that you can access the show on YouTube, SoundCloud, and MixCloud. For existing subscribers, this should be no problem. However, fans have seen that the mix cuts off at a certain time and doesn’t necessarily play all the tracks. In addition to that, podcasts save your spot when you pause and come back while Soundcloud and Mixcloud definitely don’t do this. YouTube has it own obvious drawbacks, like the lack of background listening in addition to data and battery hogging. For me, I like knowing what the tracks are, so scrolling up in the Podcast app lets me see new music. But this might not be the case moving forward. What’s more, is most of us do not want to download a sketchy extension to let our YouTube play in the background.
A lot of fans do not like this change because they say it’s no longer about the people, but about money. One user went all out in his comment about the situation.
Fans experienced the shows on Spotify and stated that it didn’t have the full two-hour set, with songs missing. This doesn’t bode well for the listener experience. Plus, they don’t know if the sets will upload on time. Some report that mixes have uploaded a day late or so. We don’t know why this transition is happening. Perhaps it is due to licensing issues with the platforms, or maybe it is about monetization to recover from the pandemic. ABGT has been a big part of all our lives so this won’t be an easy transition. But, hopefully, we see improvements or get updates along the way.
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