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About 2 years ago I started using YouTube Music full time for all my music needs.

Though it was not on my own accord.

I was a part of a Spotify family plan and was pretty pleased with it. However a member of my family suddenly got banned from Spotify, somehow. It just so happened to be the family plan owner. Now, you could create a new account, pay for a new family plan and move all the members to said plan.

If only it was that easy…

Apparently Spotify imposes a 1 year grace period for “switching families”. Thus we were stuck. Our options were:

1. Pay for Spotify on our own
2. Sail the high seas
3. Switch platform

Option 2 was out of the question, having boomers involved. They wanted access to their music even though, ironically, they barely listen to any music… ever.

Option 1 was honestly viable, but seeing as everyone wanted to retain access to music streaming anyway we might as well try a new platform. Knowing that YouTube had a good deal where you could get both YouTube premium and music streaming in one package I suggested we’d try that.

And so we did.

Tight integration with YouTube - Its biggest strength and its biggest weakness

What really differs YouTube Music from other streaming platforms is its tight integration with YouTube itself. All the biggest benefits as well as its cons stems from this exact factor.

Wide selection of music

Let’s start on a positive note: the wide selection of music. Unlike Spotify it is not as affected by licensing deals and weird country restrictions. This means that you’re more than likely to find the songs you’re looking for. In a worst case scenario the artist might not have their music on the platform but they will have a music video on there.

As for indie musicians, the barrier to publish music on YouTube is extremely low compared to Spotify. Though I will admit that it’s more common for them to post on SoundCloud so it’s not fool proof. I see it as a problem of convention rather than the platform itself.

I have found remixes and songs that only exist on YouTube due to the nature of the platform, which I appreciate.

Google “knows you” already

If you use YouTube frequently, Google already knows your preferences, to a certain degree. This is great when starting of to get good recommendations from the get-go. They also ask you about artists you like when you first log in.

Comment sections

Having a comment section is an underrated feature. I can’t really put my finger on it but there’s just something that feels so good about heading into the comment section and seeing people praise the song/artist. Makes it more fun and interactive.

View and like counts are available at all times

It’s not a big thing but being able to see these is just nice.

No playlist separation

Now for the long list of cons, because I do think there are mostly cons to the symbiotic realtionship between YouTube and YouTube music. One of them being the inability to separate playlist between the platforms. I do not want to see the countless music playlists I have on YouTube. If I wanted to see them or consume any content from it, I would go to YouTube Music. I don’t understand why they decided to do it this way. It just clutters everything up.

They have made the wise decision to not fill your YouTube Music page with playlists from YouTube. Though if you add even a single video that is classified as audio content it will appear on YouTube Music. It’s very frustrating.

Finally liking music on YouTube music, will add it to the liked videos playlist on YouTube. Why? Just why???

No subscription separation

If I really like an artist, I’d like to subscribe to them, or at the very least tell YouTube that I want to see their new releases as well as get recommended songs I haven’t heard yet. The problem is that if I subscribe on YouTube Music, I also subscribe on YouTube, meaning that my feed gets flooded with whatever shit they post. I am talking vlogs, live performances and other content I do not care for. If I want to see that type of content I would subscribe to them on YouTube. I only care for the music.

No separation of accounts

This is a really niche issue, that has a workaround. When switching account on YouTube, it will also do it on YouTube Music. I have several “brand accounts” that I use to separate content on YouTube, mostly for language learning purposes. I do it to compartmentalize recommendations and subscriptions.

The solution to this is obviously to just switch accounts when I want to listen to music. However if I have a YouTube tab open it will screw up the separation. So the real solution is to use the tab container extension for Firefox. This works well enough but is not something most people know about and thus a con in my eyes.

Explicit songs (videos) & kids’ songs won’t autoplay

On YouTube you have to click a button on age restricted videos to “confirm that you’re 18 or older”. If you happen to have such a video in your playlist then it will never play while shuffling. To top it off if you manually queue it, you will still have to click the button. Google should know at this point that I’m an old man. On the off chance they don’t know, there is a setting to allow explicit songs within YouTube Music. This should be enough to allow playback in my opinion.

Same goes for kids’ songs. Autoplay of videos/songs labeled for kids are not allowed on YouTube to “protect the kids”, and this extends to its music service. It ruins the experience.

Bad metadata

A side effect of having such a low barrier to uploading music is that you will get a lot of cases with missing or wrong metadata. It isn’t too big of a deal however it does make the experience of using YouTube Music less clean.

Disappearing videos & sudden changes in metadata

Continuing on the theme of metadata. The uploader has full freedom to change the metadata at any time. I would assume this is the case for Spotify as well but doesn’t seem to happen that frequently, if at all. On YouTube Music however it is a common occurrence, and the more indie the upload the more likely it is. Titles may change at any time, thumbnails/album art may change and in some cases the whole audio track itself might be changed as YouTube gives you the ability to edit content after uploading.

It really sucks when you suddenly discover that a song in your playlist has suddenly changed its title and audio track with no way of finding out what the original was.

Add to that, it’s not an uncommon occurrence that some songs simply dissapear, or get privated with no way of recovering the title of the original song.

Shuffle play that actually works

Ok now for the features that are not an effect of YouTube + Music integration.

You have probably seen the memes about shuffle play not being random, and frankly quite shit. This is not the case for YouTube Music however. It truly feels random and gives a wide variety of songs, nor is it repeating the song I just listened to (This goes against the notion of it being random but I digress).

Great autoplay recommendations when reaching a playlist/song’s end

I have on several occasions listened to a playlist or song and suddenly discovered new music. This is due to the autoplay that occurs whenever you reach the playlist or song in question’s end. It will continue playing similar music, and the algorithm is damn good. Sometimes so good in fact that I don’t really notice that I am listening music that is not in my playlist.

QUEUING FUCKING SUCKS

I think the following points are the reason I decided to write this blog post in the first place, because it’s infuriating to the point where I need to get it off my chest.

THE QUEUING SYSTEM IS SO ASS I CAN’T IMAGINE WHICH FUCKING IMBECILE THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD DESIGN

Imagine this, you click play on a song in your playlist. While listening to that song you decide that you want to queue some more songs. You can add a song to play next of course, and you can add a song to the end of the queue. Great!

Except it is not great. Because when you clicked that damn play button, YouTube decided to queue a fuckload of songs. Songs you never asked to queue. So when you add songs to the end of the queue, it is practically like they were never queued at all. You can clear the queue of course but by the time you remember that is how YouTube Music works you would have queued a ton of songs already, removing all progress. You can call me senile or whatever but this has happened on so many occasion that I’m genuinely losing it just thinking about it.

The web app’s performance is god awful

The modern web is not known for performant websites and YouTube Music is no exception. But somehow they have made it even worse performing than most website’s I have used. The fact that one of the world’s biggest companies can’t create a semi-decent web app is appalling.

Now if only there was a desktop version or some alternative. hmmm…

To be fair, though Spotify has its own desktop application it is ultimately built on electron. Despite this they have managed to make it performant enough to be a pleasant experience.

But I do think a desktop app would do YouTube Music good anyway. Tighter integration with system controls like media keys and in my case, (hopefully) less RAM usage would be a benefit. Running it in a firefox-fork I had unusable performance, hence I have resorted to installing chrome for the sole purpose of using YouTube Music. Though an electron app would have to spin up a whole browser session and use a ton of RAM anyway, it would in my case help a little bit. RAM is not a luxury these days…

Don’t get me wrong though, running it in chrome does help performance but it’s still not good enough.

Discovering new music

I am torn on which service I prefer when it comes to discovering new music. In the beginning, YouTube Music was clearly better. Both in terms of the aforementioned autoplay algorithm but also the discovery playlists.

This has changed however.

Battling my YouTube addiction, I turned off watch history to avoid getting recommendations in my feed. You know the story at this point. YouTube and YouTube Music are inseparable, so turning it off for one, turned it off for the other.

From there the discovery playlists have been awful. If I was going to give a ballpark estimate I would say about 70% of the songs that end up in the Discover Mix playlist are already present in one of my other playlists. I get that it probably bases it off of watch history but I feel like this is a very easy thing to fix. A couple of months ago I turned watch history back on in hopes of improving the discovery playlists but to no avail.

Personally, the biggest benefit to using a streaming service over going the pirating route are the recommendations. It’s a shame it has gotten so bad. Maybe YouTube changed something to the algorithm while I had my watch history off for it to turn out this way but there’s no way for me to find out.

Speaking of the discovery mix, a gripe I have with it is that it changes all the time. Sometimes I look through the playlist to see if there’s anything of interest but I don’t always have the time to listen through it all. The problem is that once you go back into the playlist, even if it’s just a couple of hours later, the playlist has completely refreshed. You have essentially lost potential recommendations that were of itnerest, and it’s frustrating.

Lyrics are just… worse

There’s not much to say here really. Compared to Spotify lyrics are not available as often, and if they’re available it is in most cases not synced, just a wall of text.

The social aspect - Being the only one that doesn’t use Spotify

Competition is good but not always. A great thing that comes with everyone using the same product is the social aspect. Sharing playlists, creating collaboration sessions and viewing each other’s profiles is always gonna be Spotify’s strong point. Being a person that likes to keep music a more private aspect of my life (ignore the recently liked section on the homepage of this site lmao) I don’t really care much for missing out on all of these features. I would be lying however if I said I don’t feel like an outsider whenever someone creates a collab playlist or session asking me to join and I have to reply with “Sorry, I don’t use Spotify”.

Audio quality

I heard that Spotify now supports lossless audio, which sounds great on paper (get it? hah!) but is not gonna make a difference for me. Honestly, I can’t even hear the difference between 128 kbps and 320 kbps, and I would dare say that my equipment is not the bottleneck in this scenario. Only certain very specific songs i.e. shoegaze that fully utilizes the whole bit rate have I ever noticed the difference, and even then 320 kbps is indistinguishable from a FLAC file of the same song.

Will I stick to YouTube Music?

I do overall think that Spotify is the better music streaming service, however YouTube has an ace up its sleeve that they will never be able to match: The YouTube Premium + YouTube Music combo. I can get two services for the price of one! Can I pirate music and circumvent ads on YouTube? Of course! The convenience however cannot be understated.

YouTube Music is ultimately good enough and will thus remain my music streaming service of choice for the foreseeable future, until I go broke.