How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.
I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. We paid a few dollars more for a family plan and now my father and grandfather no longer watch ads either.
First of all, isn't YouTube Music dead? Didn't it die twice already? Secondly, I don't know. I didn't look into YouTube Premium precisely because they're pushing it way too hard. I don't trust Google, I don't trust them handling ads and child-related content on YouTube right, after various YouTube Kids fiascoes. I don't trust people who are pushing their products/services this hard - so far, I was never wrong. Whatever curiosity I had about YouTube Premium, they burned it by the third time in a day I got interrupted by a full-screen "activate a trial" ad, optimized to have distracted people subscribe by mistake.
Not to mention, the way YouTube Premium story evolves, this really feels like extortion. It technically isn't, and they're in their rights, but perception matters - and because of that, I'm willing to spend a lot of effort, and even a lot of money with someone else, just to not have to deal with YouTube Premium, YouTube ads and other YouTube bullshit, while retaining easy access on the relatively infrequent occasion I want to play something from their catalogue.
Nope. Never died. I've been using it for at least a year.
If most people choose to do this, your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again. Four years later, you'll have to by the next tier up just to get the premium, curated ads back.
I absolutely hate this.
This has never happened to me even once with any service that I pay for. Hulu is the closest, but they replaced a free tier with a cheap-with-ads tier. Their expensive tier at least once had "some ads that were contractually required" but i never saw them.
And I think if "most people" paid for YTP they'd be drowning in revenue so I doubt that they'd be desperate to screw that up by repositioning YTP as something other than "ad-free."
I might get flamed for this, but while I see the reason to hate and adblock mainstream sites that have awful ads and have no paid ad-free option (see most newspapers and TV stations, especially local ones, everything that has those idiotic bottom-feeding ads at the bottom of an article, Yahoo, AOL, Newsweek, Gizmodo etc.) ... in contrast, YTP is there, it's twelve bucks a month, I don't see why anyone wouldn't pay for it instead of trying to cheat. Not saying it's a crime or even immoral, but they don't owe you video content and trying to subvert the conditions they place on access seems like basically cheating. Kind of like not paying your water bill (when you could afford it) and just using the public restroom next door 10 times a day. Not illegal, but... seems like a bad plan.