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Comment by turdnagel | Hacker News Reader

Great - now they should lower the price of YouTube Premium to be in line with other streaming services.

It's mega cheap if you use a VPN in somewhere third-world like India and sign up with a card that doesn't charge forex fees. You can then disable the VPN permanently.

I pay like 130 rupees a month (£1.30 GBP) for it. Worth it just for no ads on my phone and background playback.

Only 'gripe' is that YouTube Music sometimes pops up with random Bollywood/Indian tunes but once you train the alogrithm they disappear too (although I use Spotify anyway so it doesn't really matter).

YouTube Premium also includes music streaming, which makes the price much more reasonable.

Is it still full of uploads of old 128kbits/s mp3 encoded at least 3 times over 20 years with a great slideshow as video?

Nearly any content that was on GPM or any other streaming site has full quality audio. The only times it will use the Youtube version is if no alternative is found, or if you explicitly have the Video toggle set.

Do you have example of content which is found on most other streaming sites but uses Youtube video on YTM?

I never subscribed because of the poor quality. I didn’t know YouTube actually had proper sound if you subscribe. I don’t think it’s my fault though.

I see. I wasn't aware of the non-subscription experience being so bad. Good to know, but yes the paid version definitely uses a song database comparable to any other streaming service.

Yeah, like many Google products, it's poorly and confusingly named. It's a separate app from YouTube, and basically just like Spotify.

The only connection to YouTube is you can also listen to songs that are only uploaded to YouTube, which is a nice touch if you want to listen to tiny/hobby musicians with like 50 fans, unofficial live recordings of popular artists, niche international songs not licensed for sale in the US so they end up on YouTube, etc.

But 99% of the time, you're just listening to the same high quality versions of songs that any other streaming service has.

I wish it was separate as it was in the past.

I tried it and it sucks. In music I want high-quality audio, or at least the official music video. YouTube Music just throws anything at you.

Not really. My guess would be most YT Premium users don't even use it. I don't. I pay for Premium to remove ads. Them throwing in a bunch of additional stuff that I don't use or want (but am still required to pay for) doesn't help justify the cost at all.

YT Premium is cheaper than Netflix where I live. And I use it way more than any of the streaming services I have.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...

Thanks! I just switched to Premium Lite. I don't use downloading very often, and I never use YouTube Music or background viewing, so I think this is perfect.

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