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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

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

I switched from Spotify from YT Music solely for UX reasons. Spotify is a weird flimsy thing to me (or at least was, back when I rage-quit it). Things like, their Android app didn't even have a "play album" button. Random simple stuff just was made needlessly hard. Queueing was weird, it seemed to nudge you to shuffling / algorithmic playback, they had this weird podcast thing going on that was just in the way, and so on.

YT Music on the other hand, has excellent UX in my opinion. This surprised me, given Google's generally mediocre UX design, but they really got a bunch of competent people on this one. All the basics work the way you'd expect (and that's not trivial to get right). Play, queue, play next. Play album, shuffle, it all just generally does what I expect it to do and I can mostly find the buttons I want easily. You can turn off autoplay. Gapless album playback is on by default. It.. just works!

Also I find the algorithmic autoplay to be pretty great, found some great new artists that way.

The fact that the catalog is bigger because it includes weird bootleg recordings and live sets and anything music-y ever uploaded to YouTube, is a nice bonus. But for me, the UX sells it.

Especially compared to one of their core competitors in the US market: Amazon Music.

I don't know who pissed off who in the world of Amazon, but I'm shocked at how broken the Amazon Music app has been for the last few years. Random stops in the streaming, weird behavior on flagship phones after the app has been in the background for a while, their app store reviews tell more.

At the very least they fixed a (long-standing) bug that caused the scrollbar to conflict with side panel UI elements, making it stop/halt when you tried to view long lists of songs. Their fix was: remove the scroll.

FWIW, I prefer YT Music simply because the same app on the same phone works beautifully. It ain't perfect (my favorite is the random cross-talk with YouTube at times on 'likes', or when I occasionally see the interface change for a particular song in my play list), but I don't have to reset stuff just to listen to a few tracks in a row.

Oh my lord, reordering the queue or playlists on Amazon Music on iOS is one of the most frustrating interfaces I have ever used. It makes me so mad just thinking about it that I can hardly even pinpoint what’s wrong other than “it is almost but not quite completely broken.”

The YouTube Music UI fails at very basic things. Play a track that Google seems is "for children" and you are unable to navigate to another track or browse without it stopping playing, because the service inherited YT's clumsy COPPA compliance solution.

The UI can't cope with long titles. It uses space badly. It doesn't surface content well (no Christmas playlist on the front page during December).

It's a UI mess. I tried switching my family to it since we pay for YT Premium anyway and faced a total revolt.

I just learned that Spotify apparently likes to charge you for Taylor Swift while their algorithm pushes their own AI generated music into your ear buds which costs them nothing. That's how CEOs sell a couple billion dollars of stock options. Question is... Are you gonna continue to support him/them/they? I'm not. I'm gonna go for a bike ride right now and leave the ear buds home and listen to the sounds all around me. Take care y'all.

Where did you learn this about AI generated music on Spotify?

Not OP but there's both accusations of AI generated music [0] and the slightly overlapping issue of Spotify owned music in playlists [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526803

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530

I need to correct my comment. I had read the ghost artists story here on YC and that was my referral. I didn't know Spotify was hiring musicians to create music that Spotify then owned the rights to and they pushed onto the consumer essentially paying themselves.

Spotify hires creators to create content that Spotify owns, then uses their platform to push it onto their own playlists. They aren't subbing out real artists songs for ghost artists when you ask for a specific song.

Literally the exact same thing that every video streaming service is doing. Isn't Netflix the biggest production company on earth at this point. At least if its a cover of a song the original artist still gets royalties.

I found Spotify to be very playlist-oriented. Not great for people who listen to albums straight through. Things like pushing albums to a queue were not possible on the platform (IIRC the best you could do is play albums "next").

I believe there is some royalty-related reason why Spotify prefers playlists over albums.

Spotify is so playlist oriented, we need a button to turn a search into a playlist just to make search usable...

you can add albums to the queue. Have been able to for a long time.

YouTube music on iOS and Android is very similar to the other music apps. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-music/id1017492454 with a 4.8 on iOS, so people seem to like it.

https://music.youtube.com/ is similar to the web apps.

If you're using the video YouTube for music, you're not on the right app.

I have both Apple Music (via One Premium) and YouTube Music via YT Premium, and I lean on YT Music overwhelmingly. Its algorithmic playlists are just a universe better.

Last I tried it, you couldn't even click through different songs in an album without it jumping to the now playing screen. No way to disable that behavior in settings.

Absolute trash of a UI.

Spotify has plenty of warts but it is at least functional.

On top of that, account management, setup, building new playlists is just horrible. It feels like the person who wrote it doesn't listen to music.

Literally anything is better than Youtube music. Given that Google music was actually pretty good back in the day it is hilarious how badly Google has screwed it up.

I guess people have different needs out of their apps.

I was a long time Spotify user. When they decided to give hundreds of millions to Joe Rogan, I switched to Apple Music. Then when I got YT Premium for the video benefits, I randomly tried YT Music and it has been my primary since.

And I have zero complaints. I search for artists and albums and songs and play them. Often I start algorithmic "radio" playlists based upon one of those. It plays the music. I save things to my library. I add things to playlists.

I listen to music and I think it's a great app. And again, 4.8 on the app store, so the people for whom it's a terrible app might be the exception.

Not really, all the Google apps get five star ratings from all the spam accounts to try and make them seem more legitimate.

Neither major app store has done anything about ratings spam for a decade and the system is entirely useless.

What do you want to see in the playlist behavior? I admit I build them without much effort in YT Music and never felt constricted, but I may be missing out.

Similar but not great. That last 10% is 90% of the experience.

If the Spotify UI was the only way I could consume music, I would never listen to another song again. It's ugly, barely customizable, wastes space, wastes time, and it's flat-out user hostile, just like recent YouTube UI changes. Except unlike YouTube, I cannot reasonably modify the style and functionality to my liking, or easily use third-party clients.

It seems to me the most ethical mode of consumption which doesn't compromise consumer integrity and freedom is to use YouTube, or pirate, and to make up for lost royalties by directly supporting creators and encouraging creators to cut out the middlemen.

Vanilla VLC still feels like the best user experience to me.

Im still on Winamp, still got the keyboard keys in my muscle memory.

Agreed! Still my go-to across desktop and mobile.

I've been on a streak of days-long roadtrips using YouTube in my car for about a year and the experience has been great for me on the whole.

Spotify has such a terrible app, at least on iOS. If you download a song and have a weak cellular/WiFi connection the app prefers the connection over the downloaded song, so you just can't listen to music unless you turn on offline mode.

Similarly, if you have a weak connection and go back a song that song isn't cached which is infuriating.

This mostly happened when I was getting into my car which is barely in WiFi range but the connection wasn't stable enough to be usable, so I'd have to start driving before I could interact with Spotify.

Anyway, I switched to Apple Music a year or two ago. Spotify is trying to lock users in with the social aspect (e.g. Spotify Wrapped) but it's just not worth it.

Man, there's few things as infuriating as the Spotify app refusing to play a downloaded podcast unless i connect to the internet. can disconnect right after it starts playing, so it makes no sense.

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

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

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