I don't use YouTube music and they likely have millions of users who are in the same boat, don't use YTM but uses background play.
I'm not sure who this is for.
I primarily watch YouTube on my TV and it would be great to be able to unbundle YouTube Music. They've already tried this in Denmark, but failed to advertise it, like at all. There also was no option to downgrade, you had to cancel and then sign up again.
Makes me wonder how many people would use YTM if they only had the full premium option, but will split subscriptions across YT and Spotify with this new offering.
YTM wants to be a peer of Spotify in the same way that Google Music was positioned against iTunes. Google Music was actually a better product if you're used to buying music (the Library section in YTM is a total afterthought). YouTube Music assumes you're streaming. It's still primarily a music player - I think you can watch music videos through it if you try, but its main purpose is audio, and the corpus it pulls music from I assume is the same as all the music streaming services. It's not like it's playing music videos and hiding the picture.
Honestly, the experience on YTM can be a little rough. It doesn't have the level of polish that Rdio had before it. But subscribing takes the ads off of YouTube, and I can deal with a slightly rougher app to also make my streaming video experience better.
It's impressive the amount of work the NewPipe folks put in, both to keep up with this and to make the app more feature complete over time.
That aside, Premium Lite is for people who use YouTube for the video content (as opposed to only for the audio), which is most people.
I probably wouldn't even use it, but don't like to reward stingy dark patterns