YT Premium, definitely yes. However, YT Music is hot garbage. The UI is utter crap and the mixing of video and music is awful, especially playlists. Why the hell would I want my regular YT and music playlists mixed up together anyway? It gets worse with kids, as some video-songs (randomly!) trigger the inability to play in the background.

If you haven't already:

Disable Settings > Recommendations > Show your liked music from Youtube

Enable Settings > Data saving > Don't play music videos

That first one only appears in YT music. My regular YouTube still has my music playlists.

Thanks though. Maybe some day they'll put in some effort.

I liked Google Play Music when it first came out. But development was basically stopped and they replaced it with the crappy YT Music App. Unless they majorly change YouTube music I'll stay with Spotify.

Dev wasn't just stopped. The whole product was sunset and if you wanted to keep a semblance of what you had, you were forced to migrate to YouTube music. I saw the end of that crap rainbow and finally moved over to koel which has done just as much as I ever cared to use in Google music, but now I don't fear Google getting bored and killing the product in some future.

One big upside of having access to video in your music collection is all the independently-uploaded songs and song versions that have not officially found their way to streaming.

If your tastes are more eclectic this can be a really big thing actually -- the music streaming services are largely similar in what they do and don't have, which leaves out a LOT of stuff, and finally things vanish off of streaming all the time. Individually-uploaded youtube music-in-a-video on the other hand is astonishingly durable.

Totally agree about the UI though, and they also suck on royalty payouts -- only Spotify is worse.

can you sell it to a current spotify user?

YouTube's music library feels richer than Spotify. A few years ago I was contemplating a switch from YT Music to Spotify (I like Spotify's UX), but a lot of stuff I enjoy listening to was missing. But I might just have a weird taste in music.

I use both, spotify for my main listening and yt music for mixes, live shows, and lots of content that plainly isn't on spotify.

Yt music also supports tapping the side of the screen to jump forwards or backwards in 10 second increments. Seems like a trivial feature, but holy shit I have needed it my entire life. The ability to both rapidly and finely adjust the time is huge when listing to things like live shows that are a 2 hour video.

Crazy but I don't think I have ever had a program or hardware player that could do both. Always either fast forward/rewind or trying to finely slide a slider.

I pay for youtube premium for ad-free youtube and to support creators automatically.

Youtube music is not great, but its "free" to me.

That’s literally it.

It’s probably inferior to both Spotify and Apple Music, but if you’re going to pay for YouTube premium anyway and are able to endure the weird UI… Then it might save you a small monthly fee you’d otherwise pay to competing services.

It’d never survive in the market as it’s own service, and it’s clearly inferior even to its own predecessor Google Music.

I have no idea who decided this thing was a good idea.

Google Music was the best of the bunch and I am sad that it is gone. Google internal power struggles strike again.

If you can self host, I finally found that koel did a relatively decent job covering my old gmusic patterns.

I must have extremely unsophisticated music needs, I've never had any complaints using the interface or finding any music that I want.

I remember Google Music being pretty good, but YouTube Music seems good enough

Same. I am always a little surprised to read these comments. Moved from Spotify to Google Play Music to YouTube Music and never really had many issues...

Not sure about inferior to spotify though. Lots of things (for me at least) aren't available on spotify, even with subscription. More often than not quality is actually better on YT music. Major thing is also asking in car for 'yo google play me this and that' and spotify just returns some nonsense or cover where YT Music always returns the right thing. Apple music is absolute crap, quality of sound was enough that I didn't even bother extending trial into anything more and UI is atrocious.

YT music, for me at least, not perfect but better than the two by far. I still keep spotify sub because sometimes we share playlists in office etc.. not sure I'll extend to be honest. YT Music on the other hand, especially in car is essential.

> Apple music is absolute crap, quality of sound was enough that I didn't even bother extending trial

Sound quality not good enough? You know Apple Music supports lossless up to 24-bit 192kHz, at no cost, right?

Just what are you talking about?

No, I don't know that since I never got to experience it through web nor app. Maybe I need to own an iphone? Googling for it turned a ton of questions about poor audio quality and some hacks as potential solutions, not to mention often blaming user's hardware setup for it. YT Music is no shenanigans just works, and works great, solution.

One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is the recommendation engine is much better in YT Music than Spotify IMHO. I've found a surprisingly large number of new artists that I enjoy and it's solely due to YTM's recommendation engine. Really obscure stuff that I just wouldn't have found otherwise.

Spotify's catalog for Indian languages is smaller than Youtube. Not only is YT Music's collection larger, the recommendation system works better for Indian languages too. I have been that the autoplay follows the mood/ type of the song better than Spotify.

When I first compared Spotify/YT Premium (Google Music at the time):

- Relatively similar offerings of music, at least when it came to my tastes. I have a wide variety and some weird stuff in there, but both worked for me to find whatever I thought of.

- Relatively similar price ($10 Spotify vs $12 YT), so I knew I needed at least some extra value from YT to justify

- YT Premium not only gives me YT Music, but also HASSLE FREE ad-free YT. What I mean is -- I don't have to manage extensions for web youtube and apps for Android or iOS or using NextDNS or a pihole or something just to get "ad free" from YT. It just works. Not having ads, and not having to CARE is a big value add for me. This alone is well worth $2 a month just in the time it saves me dealing with it.

- YT Premium USED to be Google Music, which I loved the UI of way more than Spotify. I am still VERY upset at YT Music since it's objectively worse than Google Music in every way, but it's still the same goddamn company

- AT THE TIME, I was having serious issues getting Spotify to play music from cache. Even if I cached, it would still default to streaming it as long as I had data. This resulted in huge data usage each month. I am SURE this is fixed by now. But this went into the calculus for me at the time.

Would I move over to Spotify? I think the things that would push me back would be an increase in YT price, a further degradation in YT Music UX, some new killer feature Spotify has/gets (podcasts aren't my thing)

This was a VERY long answer which can TLDR to "Having ad-free YouTube + Music all at once for $2 more was well worth not having to give a crap about all the infrastructure needed to block ads across all my devices forever."

I like recommendation engine better. Also up to 5 people in family plan.

5 additional people, so 6 total

Works like shit. No support for basic features such as crossfade. Recommendations are repetitive, uninsightful and low-quality. No desktop app, and the web app is as bug-complete as any other alphabet property. Enjoy losing access to your playlist and album collection when your google account gets randomly banned.

Not a spotify fan either, but there's practically no upside to switching.

the sales pitch is that for $15 instead of $10, you get ad-free youtube as well as everything spotify gives you.

but the reality is that you're losing spotify radio and recommendations, and replacing it with youtube music's radio stations and recommendations. and for me, i found that spotify introduces me to a lot of new and interesting music that i wouldn't otherwise find, and youtube picks a dozen songs every month it wants to play, and regardless of what station i choose it plays those same songs.

for me, i'm currently paying for both because i like youtube premium, but the music offering doesn't replace spotify.

I guess most people forgot fast that Spotify platformed a major antivaxxer? I cancelled them immediately and can't even imagine subscribing to them any time. It was just a year ago...

lmao

Yeah a few million dead is very funny