1) Quality is acceptable

2) Large part of world's population can't afford subscription services

3) There's a lot of music that is not on music streaming services but is on YouTube

4) Sometimes you need the mp3 file (for ringtone, for editing, for remixing etc)

5) There are still some people who rather want everything on their HDD

6) content disappears from YT all the time, as anyone with large playlists must have notice. Better keep a local copy.

> There's a lot of music that is not on music streaming services but is on YouTube

A lot of Caribbean music (Soca, Dancehall, Parang etc.) is like this.

>It's not generally that great a quality right?

You just described youtube in general. As the old saying goes, "content is king". Look at VHS (if you're old enough to remember). As bad of a quality as it was, everyone used it. Pros would complain about how bad it looked, but the mass populace was just fine with it. Youtube is the same way. In the beginning, the quality was soooo bad, but users didn't care because it gave them endless content.

> Look at VHS

Pfft, people bought 5-in-1 DVDs. People bought 10-in-1 DVDs. Average Joe doesn't care about "quality", he wants the content.

5 movies encoded to fit on a DVD-9 will still look much better than the typical VHS. They will also sound much better. Comparing DVD to VHS will always have DVD winning, unless the content was encoded from VHS.

See: cell phone speakers.

I use paid youtube music and it seems high quality to me I can't tell a difference. Love having different stuff like Tiny Desk.

But more than the quality for the top 100 pop songs almost all the official music videos they now put in like interludes, breaks, talking over and stuff to cut it up so it's not just the song.

Makes listening harder. for those who come to watch the video too.

It's as good of quality as listening directly on YouTube, which is fine enough for most people.