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Comment by mstipetic | Hacker News Reader

I still don’t get how YouTube (premium + music) isn’t a clear winner here. Why use Spotify if you can get all that for the same price?

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I'm not a Spotify user, I'm an Apple Music user, though if there wasn't Apple Music I'd use Spotify.

The reason that I'd never use YT Music is that I never trust anything from Google: their interfaces are ugly, everything's user-unfriendly, and they have the habit of discontinuing a service at any time. Also it has the impression of not really being well-thought as a product: why name a music service after a video service? I know it's not the case but it always reminds me of those low quality music playlists where people collected low quality unofficial music videos back then in YT just for the music: simply not the right tool for the job.

A lot of people listened to music from YouTube as their primary source besides an FM radio before Spotify was available as it is now. YouTube somewhat famously signed deals with music labels back in the day. Content ID was the controversial, but necessary compromise for the music to remain on YouTube. I am pretty sure a very significant percentage of music listeners globally listen mainly from YouTube, I did it and I also saw a lot of people doing it.

It may seem stupid or counter productive, but it is easy and good enough. YT Music is a clear upgrade for those users.

I think YT Music makes more sense than many of the Google initiatives and it will continue to make sense as long as they will have deals with music labels.

Those people generally didn’t care about audio quality, YouTube for me seems synonymous with unreliable bit rates and disorganisation.

Quoting a reddit post:

> Youtube's best audio is format 251: Opus with a variable bitrate target of 128k. Note that 128k Opus is approximately equal in quality to 320k mp3 (as in, it's generally considered transparent)

I care a lot about audio quality and I use YT premium for music just about every day. You also get enhanced bitrate on some videos with premium.

I use regular YouTube (not Music) for discovering music by way of playlist mix videos sometimes (such as the retrowave/chillwave/etc mixes by soulsearchanddestroy), but if I like a playlist well enough I’ll rebuild it in my Apple Music library with a combination of tracks on AM natively or in some cases with Bandcamp purchases. Music being tied up in YouTube long term is cumbersome, even with YT Premium offline downloads as an option.

Google already shut down their first music streaming service.

Trying to get your playlists out was a complete nightmare too, some moron at Google decided on a ridiculously poor data structure. It was something utterly absurd like a zip with a CSV file per track, that generally had only that track in it.

Not going back to a Google run one.

Shut down seems a bit much, it was transitioned from google play music to youtube music.

I still have all my google play music playlists from 2015 in youtube music.

Well, they shut down two music services. The first was Songza, which they bought. They then took everything Songza had- namely their awesome mood-based, artisanally curated playlists- and put it into Google Play Music. Then they seemingly let go of everyone who maintained the playlists and never updated them again? Those playlists on Songza were _excellent_ and the Snoop Dog collabs were just delightful.

Not sure how Google internally makes decision but I imagine it works entirely quarter by quarter trying to measure individual Impact with no overarching vision or direction.

YT Music really is odd. I pay for YT Premium and so have played with it a few times but it feels rather ill-suited for its purpose… as you say, the video streaming heritage is quite evident. Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, heck even Amazon Music last I tried it have much more music-oriented UIs.

YouTube is also actively hostile to third party devs in ways that at least Apple isn’t, somehow. Third party Apple Music clients have existed for years using official Apple-provided APIs, which YouTube isn’t going to ever allow even for paying customers.

From my end the decision to not use the Google product comes from two places. Firstly, any money I send to Google is probably a net negative for the human race as a whole (though the same could probably be said for Spotify). Secondly (and much more importantly for me personally), YouTube is quite addictive, and having premium would enable me. If someone offered me a music streaming subscription with a bit of free crack cocaine on the side, I would not take it over someone offering me just the subscription, regardless of the price (up to a point)

As a counterpoint, YouTube is a vast chasm of highly educational and worthwhile media. There's no other space like it for long-form independent educators, and it's a creative space we need to protect by keeping it economically viable for YouTube. At least until comparable spaces (with sustainable audiences) exist.

There are plenty of better alternatives to YouTube for independent educational media. For example, Udemy, Skillshare, or Coursera which allow independent educators and don't rely on poor recommendation algorithms or incessant advertising (both from the platform and in sponsorships)

Better alternative in some regards, maybe, but for discoverability, there is no bigger platform than YT. It's the Walmart of media consumption with a "you're going to make it up in volume" concepts

I've sampled all of those services. None of those have comparable, sustainable mass audiences like YouTube. They also lack integration with my other consumption, which YouTube provides. And in general, the quality of independent educational content I find on YouTube is quite good and is often a product of YouTube culture itself, now that we are no longer in the first generation of YT creators, and I quite like the culture and its aesthetic.

Udemy, Skillshare and Coursera have failed to create a product which attracts me, and the general population. Their focus on specific content and consumption habits is both a blessing and a curse, depending on who you ask.

I don't know about Udemy or Skillshare, but I gave up on Coursera a long time ago because almost everything on there seems to be of a "X for non-X-majors" variety. They tend assume no prerequisites and are generally super watered down.

YouTube is also a vast repository of conspiracy bullshit with a recommender algorithm that is happy to start feeding you as much of it as you can autoplay.

This is my objection to paying them. They push a lot of ragebait. They have a lot of longform advertising that is just raw conspiracies or medical quackery.

My understanding is that 55% of your YouTube premium payment goes to the creators you watched to compensate them for lost ad dollars (and I believe creators actually earn slightly more per premium viewer than per ad-supported viewer). So in some ways, if you pay for YouTube premium you are actually paying to drown out conspiracy theories and ragebait content with whatever content it is that you prefer.

Spotify directly funds/endorses Joe Rogan.

Yes, and you should disable autoplay and browse with intent. You should network with others and use your network as a discovery pipeline instead of relying on an opaque algorithm.

After a while, the algorithm aligns somewhat anyway and you occasionally get a good recommendation from the front page or related videos. But first, you have to curate your tastes so that it knows what to pull.

I could generalize your comment to say that the world wide web itself contains a vast repository of useless or malicious content and is a dangerous pipeline to extremism. But we find corners of it that don't facilitate toxic content, and we ensure the livelihood of those who produce useful things for us. They benefit from a narrowcasting service with a large audience and ad network such as YouTube. Until one of us can provide them a better service, that's what they're stuck with.

Companies with billion of dollars in profit yearly are not charity cases and no one should feel bad about not giving them money.

Who cares about a corp, my comment was focused on keeping creators employed. I do think the splits are terrible, and I recommend directly supporting creators you enjoy.

You said keep Youtube economically viable, not directly pay creators.

keep Youtube economically viable... so that creators can get paid.

UI/UX? YT is the most hated UX of anything I ever use. It’s different in terrible ways on each platform, too.

On desktop I use YouTube music because of how bad the Apple Music app is. On mobile, I use Apple Music.

What about the app don't you like? I ask because I'm done with Spotify and looking for the next service.

Apple Music has a really bizarre interface for managing playlists. It’s so cumbersome and takes way too many clicks. Probably as a side effect of being mobile first

Can you describe how? I actually find playlist editing to be really easy on Apple Music/iTunes.

Wow I just tried it out and it's quite awful, you're right. The way Spotify allows you to see what's in the 'radio' station and then add additional tracks to a playlist is great – there's almost no similar functionality in Apple music.

Actually bonkers that discovery is this bad in Apple music

The desktop app is the same as the mobile one, what issue are you seeing?