I remember finding this article several years ago when the watermark was really quite obvious and offensive. Especially obvious in piano music, since the tone of a piano doesn’t naturally waiver. Since then, they’ve either dialed it back or removed it, because I don’t experience this anymore.
Yes: I was unwilling to subscribe to Google Play Music (as then was) because something like half of their classical music collection—including all of Deutsche Grammophon— was unlistenable due to watermarking. It was so bad that I actually reported it internally as bug against the GPM player before I learned that it was a watermark thanks to Matt's article. Much griping about it persuaded someone on the GPM team to get fresh, supposedly-fixed recordings from UMG but to no avail: the new audio seemed to be as bad as the old.
That was a few years ago, and I lost track of what happened after that but evidently UMG actually fixed the problem at some point because YT Music seems fine now, and I no longer notice the problem on other streaming services that were also formerly affected by it.
