As for Youtube music, yup, that's undeniably a good deal. The music services should watch out, especially in younger demographics (I'm already 30+, Spotify premium user since 2009). Apple will probably push Music even harder and bundle that with their new video streaming. Spotify's really trying to become the defacto podcast service, which sucks in its own right (unlike Apple Podcasts, no user facing RSS support for indie premium content etc. Podcasting is the last free rich medium on the internet, largely thanks to Apple).
As for music, I'm too deep in the Spotify ecosystem myself, with stuff like proper Last.fm integration, recommendations and consistent audio quality.
I can't really enjoy music with that mushy sound typical for content that has been lossy-lossy transcoded tons of times. Of course, I have to deal with that for all the awesome live takes[1] available on Youtube, and there I'm of course just grateful they exist.
Spotify's audio didn't use to be all that great, except with the normalization turned off. Now with their 'quiet' normalization option, that doesn't compress quiet tracks (a clear edge over Apple Music), it's starting to sound transparent to me, as -q 9 encoded (~320 kbps) Vorbis should.
Youtube doesn't allow disabling of normalization at all, and it's not super clear to me when tracks are clean encodes sourced from the proper music distribution ecosystem that stocks Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal et al.
Isn't that kind of the point? If you can't tell which is which without a visual cue (aka bias-generator) then they sound the same.
This isn't a comparison test. There's only one version uploaded. With only one version, it's hard to tell if many flaws you hear were introduced by sloppy uploading or if they were present in the master.
I'd sure pay Spotify extra for lossless, because I'm weird in ways I'll reveal below, but I agree that people should give lossy compression a break. Well-encoded AAC and Vorbis averaging over 256 kbps are very transparent-sounding, in ways that never was possible with mp3. If I put in time, I get 5/6 right in this famous test from NPR's website[1], just because mp3 is awful and ancient.
But I double dare anyone to blind test Opus as low as ~128 and ~160 kbps and working upwards, with decent gear. Having grown up with shitty mp3s, it feels like magically good. And it's free software.
Even lossy-lossy transcoded AAC and Opus, which Youtube uses for a lot of stuff, sounds shockingly fine, most of the time, on most equipment, if the original copy was ok to begin with. All this is mostly passable, especially as background music.
That is, until you run into special circumstances, like listening attentively with halfway-decent equipment. Spotify's default normalization mode sometimes can adds dynamic compression, which sounds bad in itself. But this can make artifacts stand out in ways shouldn't (thank god for the 'quiet' setting, added sometime in 2018). This is especially true with poor source material, for example the stupidly bright 90s Led Zeppelin remasters, which still float around on tons of curated Spotify playlists, despite being superseded by really good releases.
So what I'm trying to say is that I want to maintain a music library I can pull up on any device and expect consistently good quality during playback. Take my little hobby I discussed here as an example (that is, me and my friends independently inventing the Japanese audiophile parlor/café concept) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583900
Just because I can't hear a guitar riff getting slightly distorted or hi-hats smeared when I listen at work, doesn't mean I won't hear it with in an acoustically outstanding room with 5k worth of audio gear. This problem is very pronounced with Youtube material when there's a poor supply chain, so I won't add a bunch of random garbage from Youtube in a playlist on the tram and expect to actually enjoy it later as I'm leaning back in a proper listening room.
Spotify, on the other hand is relatively close to providing a universally sane way to access music on any device.
1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...
https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/thread/338369?msgid=...
Stats for nerds: https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/thread/340313?msgid=...
What annoys me is they're mixing together two features (namely normalization and dynamic range compression) and putting them behind one toggle.
I want normalization, it's hugely annoying playing music on my PS4 because the Spotify client doesn't have it there and I constantly have tot tweak the volume.
I do not want compression.
But on my phone and computer I have to use their 'normal' normalization level and take the compression because 'quiet' means I am constantly turning up my sound level when listening to Spotify and turning it back down when I do anything else so my ears don't get blasted.
And just like the PS4 example, it's just insane to me that Spotify Connect doesn't mandate normalization.
For the moment, I get around this conundrum using a combination of uBlock Origin[0] (Firefox) and NewPipe[1] on Android. Not 100% sure what I'll do about the latter when I switch to iOS.
[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [1] https://newpipe.schabi.org/
I guess I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum. I want to opt-out of being the product and instead be a customer by paying for "Google Premium" or whatever. It would be an "all things Google" subscription, not just YouTube. Any place there would normally be a Google-curated ad... there wouldn't be one. No more ads at the top of my Google searches. No ads embedded in web pages I visit (rather, Google pays the content provider some fixed amount from my account balance or whatever -- after prompting me to authorize it). No tracking, no "value-add," nothing. Just, "Here's my money, provide me an equitable and reasonable Internet experience that makes sure content providers get fair compensation, and otherwise leave me the fuck alone."
And, most importantly, that would mean that I could never be locked out of my GMail account without a fucking handwritten letter on Crane & Co. stationary with a direct phone number to a human being who I can talk to about whatever is going on.
You could argue that you'd just be paying a gestapo-like figure for the "privilege" of doing stuff that "should be" free. But you're already paying, in the sense that you're the product, and your time and attention is the currency.
Considering that it needs to make actual money (and the streaming royalties for music are kinda expensive).
I find some of the anti-Google arguments to be really, really weird and I've been speaking against Google on this website countless of times.
If you don't want to be tracked, you're going to be tracked for as long as you're a free user. uBlock Origin will not save you, since you're on their website and you can't block "youtube.com".
Also Google is a big target and subject to laws such as GDPR. I actually trust Google more than I trust any startup advertised on HN, because Google is a big target with a lot of eyes watching. When you go to your profile and turn off the data collection, you can probably trust Google more than you can trust DuckDuckGo.
This isn't to say that you should trust Google. Not what I'm saying.
But paying a membership is voting with your wallet against ads. By not paying you're simply encouraging them to serve more ads. And the break you're getting via uBlock Origin is only temporary. If the audience using ad-blockers on Android grows, I expect them to simply block browser access, problem solved. And because you used YouTube anyway, it means you haven't payed for their competition either, which means you directly contributed to YouTube's monopoly, without encouraging them to give up on ads in favor of Premium memberships.
It's basically how software piracy used to work. Piracy was never a problem for the big companies like Microsoft, piracy being responsible in part for Microsoft's monopoly. And when piracy became a problem, software companies simply moved to online subscriptions. There's always a solution for milking free loaders later.
I remember vividly the day (sometime in 2013?) when they removed that feature from the base app. I had been streaming music or casts from YouTube in the background since day 1 of my iPhone 4, and suddenly it became a paid feature.
"Bastards", I thought with a smile, "but hey, fair enough! Ok, now where do I pay?..."
Except that outside of the US, premium wasn't available. So they had removed background play but offered no alternative. It lasted until 2017!! Took them 4 years to bring the premium offer to Europe... what a shame. That fueled some resentment, as a wannabe customer. Any gave more than enough time to find better alternatives (Spotify, youtube-dl...) and never look back.
When they finally introduced premium in my country, I took the free 3 months offer and cancelled immediately thereafter. They don't want my money, 4 years made that emphatically clear.
I may reconsider after 2021, on the condition that management has changed at YouTube and Google. Right now, I'm just not feeling it.
Google is just awful at marketing stuff and customer service. They plain and simple don't care. That's monopoly for us: customers lose, always. So I find it both logical and "the right thing to do" to spend my money to directly support creators and alternative platforms whenever I can.
But on firefox you can get play in background with this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
Edit: Firefox on Android. I do not know about iOS
For me it was those incessant Grammarly ads. A service, by the way, that has its own serious security and privacy concerns[0].
(I feel like YouTube Premium ($18/mo for up to 6 people) is a better deal than Spotify Premium ($15/mo for up to 6 people) for a household like mine where we listen to a lot of music and use YouTube a lot. I don't know how YouTube compares to Spotify when it comes to music selection however.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315684