As a YouTube Premium subscriber, I get YouTube Music included in my subscription fee, yet I use Spotify as my main music service. It’s been this way for years, but sometimes I like to give YouTube Music another chance since it can save me a few dollars should I choose to cancel my Spotify subscription.
Last time I did this, I quickly went back to using Spotify, but these services never stand still, and I think enough time has passed to give it another go. Maybe YouTube has improved its music service so much that I’ve been a fool to pay extra money to a separate service.
YouTube Music feels like the Wild West of music libraries
Where is this music coming from?
In the past, one point I had to give to YouTube Music was that it had a wider range of music than Spotify. There were some artists or sometimes specific albums that I just could not find on Spotify. That’s no longer the case, and for me personally, everything I listen to is now on Spotify. Although, annoyingly, seemingly random songs disappear from Spotify from what I must assume are fluctuating licensing agreements.
The wider range of music made my biggest pet peeve with YouTube Music easier to overlook, but now that this is no longer the case, I just can’t stand the random “bootleg” tracks that sometimes come up. If I’m paying for a streaming music service, I expect the music to be official and made using the studio master from the record label that owns the license.
This is particularly annoying when driving in my car, where I don’t have the free attention (or hands) to fix the issue.
Spotify is built for people who actually care about music
Organizing my musical life is easy
Another big takeaway from my month with YouTube Music is how bad it is at letting me find, organize, and manage my music. It feels like a tacked-on afterthought that’s just a slightly modified YouTube video management system underneath.
Finding playlists on Spotify is easier, and as I mentioned, all the songs on those lists are the correct ones and not a random upload. Artist pages feel better laid out and intuitive on Spotify. It feels closer to the old experience of having a CD or record and reading through the liner notes as you listen than what YouTube is doing. YouTube Music is perfectly functional, but I don’t get that “music-first” feeling from it.
I also feel like the special artist introduction playlists are better on Spotify. This is obviously going to be subjective, but when I look at these lists of artists where I know their body of work well, I feel like the YouTube lists don’t have as much thought put into it. This makes me feel like if I want an introduction to a new artist, Spotify’s onboarding list will probably give me a more representative selection of songs.
Discovery is where the fight gets interesting
Looking for the new hotness
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek
Do you remember Pandora? Yes, I know it still exists, but I had to leave it behind because it wasn’t supported in my current region, which is another reason I moved to Spotify. The best thing about Pandora was how good it was at helping me discover new music. It was the most valuable feature of that service in my opinion.
Now, neither Spotify nor YouTube Music is as good as I remember Pandora being at this job, but I feel like Spotify’s suggestions are complete garbage. I never use the AI-powered playlist option because it always slots songs into my list that I hate.
Funnily enough, if I let YouTube Music automatically add music to the end of a playlist, most of the time it chooses music I like. I don’t know if this is because YouTube has figured out all the algorithmic sorcery years ago, but in my experience at least, this is one area YouTube Music wins. Sadly for Google, I just add its suggestions to my Spotify playlist.
Spotify now dominates at music videos too
Well, well. How the turntables
In the past, one area where YouTube Music was clearly better was in music videos. It’s a video platform after all. Even though many of the videos were unofficial and terrible quality, they were there. I could set up a huge music video playlist and then play that list on my smart TV so I could pretend MTV’s golden age never ended.
Well, Spotify is now better at this too. There are plenty of music videos; they are all official and high-quality, and getting that big video playlist is easy and seamless.
It’s also got a great selection of properly formatted 4:3 music videos that work a treat on my CRT monitor, which makes up part of my triple monitor setup. I use it to play media while I work, and Spotify is right at home.
Audio quality quietly seals the deal
The clincher for me is audio quality. I’m not some sort of audiophile, but to my ear, YouTube Music sounds consistently worse than Spotify no matter what equipment I use it on. That’s before YouTube Music pulls in one of those awful user uploads to shred my ears with audio quality that’s not worth paying for. So, for now, I’ll be sticking with Spotify as the best general-purpose streaming service.
