Eh. YouTube isn't a very good platform for music, and it's even worse if you aren't paying for the premium service. Why wouldn't you use something like Spotify?
Eh, I just left Youtube Music considering to go back to Spotify. Youtube Music has a terrible UI, lacks features, and feels like an afterthought to entice people to get Youtube Premium.
Honestly, if you're paying for Youtube Premium, you might as well use YT Music, but it's all around worse than Spotify.
What's wrong with YouTube Music in your opinion? I haven't tried it out much but YouTube has a really good video player and an extensive library of music videos and music in general so I'm surprised you'd say it's awful.
I ask myself this a lot as someone who pays for both Spotify and Youtube Premium (which includes Youtube Music).
Youtube music has all of the music ever posted on youtube which is nice because it means you can generally find almost anything there (even obscure stuff not on Spotify). Unfortunately this can also make it harder to find what you are looking for, youtube music is full of low quality user submitted covers/remixes of songs that I don't want to hear but sometimes it plays anyways. Sometimes youtube music will have versions of songs that were really meant to accompany a music video and not the standalone song itself which is annoying to say the least.
The app is also far less capable as a standalone music app. Never has any lyrics, this weird concept of switching between video and audio, hard to view all fo the work of a particular artist/group on one page, no continuity between mobile and desktop a la Spotify. The hand curated playlists are also updated less than the ones on Spotify. Interestingly the machine generated recommendations from Spotify have also always been much better than that of Youtube Music, which is strange given how good Youtubes video recommendation algorithm has gotten in recent years.
On top of all of this I have been using Spotify since 2013; I have a massive amount of music in my library there that I have no way of porting over to Youtube Music.
YouTube Music is _such_ complete trash I'm planning on canceling my subscription altogether and going to Spotify. It uses YouTube videos to back up your song library which means, in my experience:
1) streams are of FAR lower and more variable quality
2) Some of the weird and wonderful music that was on Google Music is nonexistent on YouTube
3) COPYRIGHT STRIKES from YouTube videos apply to your music library(!?)
The whole transition is a horrible idea, and I wish they would have canned it.
That's what I use. YouTube on a free account is unusable, and I don't trust ad blockers. YouTube Music isn't perfect. A lot of songs aren't there or it's a music video version, but there's things like concerts, compilations, session recordings, covers, people improvising, etc.
YouTube’s primary value add for me is music remixes and covers that can’t legally make it to Spotify / Apple music / etc., but skirt around the DMCA takedowns. I try and use it as my primary driver for music but the recommendation engine is just terrible. I listen to days of classic rock and most of my recommendations are still centered around that one EDM song I listened to a week ago. Probably because the ratio of people playing EDM videos with sexy thumbnails to people “watching” classic rock lyric videos is very high. Oh well.
I use ad blocker a lot. After seeing this title, for a sec I felt frustrated about YouTube but then I realized it is better for me and my family to subscribe YouTube premium… and I just did it.
Long story: We are Chinese family living in US. We listen to both Chinese and English songs. We have both Apple Music and Spotify memberships, but due to copyright, many Chinese songs are not available (sometime this is true for other languages or even English songs, that’s why we have both subscriptions). Since a few years ago, I just found that YouTube has all the songs we love, some are high quality live stage recordings that are even better to listen (kinda surprising since YouTube is blocked in China mainland). So nowadays my family are listening music on YouTube more frequently: we have our own playlists, use YouTube on iPhone Safari with AdGuard so no noisy ads. The problem is we have to keep safari open and can’t use other apps when listening to music. Also jumping in the playlist is painful especially when driving.
Now this HN title just reminds me of YouTube premium that has no ads, supports background playing, and better playlist control. Then I really don’t see a reason to keep Apple Music and Spotify subscriptions which together cost more but still lack of songs we love.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and this represents my personal opinion.
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