But to be honest, if I really want to listen to a whole album then I use YouTube Music, which is included in YouTube premium. What I like about it is that if the song isn't available then it offers the video instead so I can listen to it anyway.
Regarding quality, most music is listened to in traffic, or on the bus, or while working, or as background in a store, or while exercising, or.... I think it should be pretty obvious that the majority of the time, quality is just not a factor.
The compression was terrible. The ads were unstoppable. I love music, but for decades before we all fell in love with music despite the poor medium we listened it to. YouTube isn't any different.
I guess in the same way that we used to buy singles, although I never bought that many because you got more bang for buck buying the whole album.
Where I did draw the line was when I heard them start asking each other if they had seen the latest song from so-and-so.
At which point they both got an MP3 player and a bit of a lecture about how music is audio and everything else is marketing
It saddens me, as a musician and producer, how YouTube is the go-to for listening to music. We put a lot of effort into audio engineering, and the flow of an album, only to have a ton of that work degraded by YouTube’s shitty compression or ads that interrupt the intended experience.