8 Months of YouTube Music

In late April of 2021, I switched over from using Spotify to YouTube Music. I know that I wrote something about it, but grep tells me otherwise. Oh well.

The quick version is this: I realized that if I bought YouTube Premium instead of Spotify, then I could better support the people I like to watch and listen to. I figured I'd mention my experience with it. Spotify and Apple Music take a lion's share of the market, and it might be useful for someone to have some information about it.

(As a quick note: I've also used Pandora in the past. The user experience in the app was so bad that I quit a year-long free subscription only three months in.)

((As another quick note: I'm slowly growing a local music library by buying things off Bandcamp. That's for another day, though.))

I'm not as into music as a lot of people are. I'll use my phone to play music in the car, or put something on while I work, but I don't follow any particular artists' releases or go to live shows or anything of the sort. I say this because it means my usage of music streaming apps is very limited: either I put on the automatically generated playlist, or have it make one from a specific song I feel like listening to. With that out of the way, I'll cover my gripes before the parts I like. Luckily, I only have two issues, and they are both minor.

The first is that YTM doesn't have anything like Spotify's year-end Wrapped analytics. I think it would be fun to see that kind of thing. On the other hand, when checking for the date I started my YTM subscription, I found that the screen for YTM benefit data (or more specifically, YT Premium data) like ads skipped was missing. Since I turned off any history tracking in any of my Google services, they didn't have anything to pull that info from. I loathe having any kind of search/browse/watch/listen history in anything I use, so that's a fair trade off. Point is - even if they had YTM "Wrapped", I probably wouldn't be able to use it anyway.

The other gripe is that YTM's auto-playlists seem... limited. Like they never try to branch out to new songs unless I've already skipped all the ones I've heard. Spotify had a discovery playlist just for this, and I found some really nice music that way.

As for positives, I can get YT Premium that includes YTM for just two dollars more. I block every ad I see (because the Web is a nightmare if I don't), so getting YTP lets me still support the people I watch. Plus it means no ads on my phone's YouTube app either!

...

There really isn't much more than that for me. As I said, I don't have a very high standard for music apps. This really comes down to discovery quality vs supporting the people who make things I enjoy, and the answer is obvious. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled silence.