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Comment by muppetman | Hacker News Reader

I pay for YT Premium. Not because I care for stupid videos, but because you get YT Music for free with it... Spotify is the hottest of garbage in my opinion, constantly trying to push podcasts at me. Why more people don't cancel Spotify and just pay for YT Premium - you get ad-free videos and all the music of Spotify. Plus with YT Music you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got that isn't on Spotify you can have anywhere you're logged into your YT Music account.

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Its baffling how bad YT Music reccomendations are for me though (personally). My personal email account is something I have had since 2008 and there is probably history going back till then and even then somehow YT Music just gives bad reccomendations

Yea, recommendations aren't great, but then Spotify wasn't much good either. This is an area where I hope their work in AI can help. Instead they seem to be focusing on stupid integrations like in the Play Store - now I can ask the Play Store about an app... wtf?

I pay for both YouTube Premium and Spotify Premium, because I don't think that Google's music offerings have ever been that good.

There's no desktop app for YouTube Music for starters.

What would you want/need a desktop app for? If you use Chrome (and yes, I'm aware some people use Firefox) you can install it as an App that way, so it appears in your start menu/finder. It can cast to your local devices etc.

I can't think of a single reason I'd want/need a standalone app over having the Chrome version of the app, which to all intents and purposes appears as a standalone app anyway.

So I'm curious, what's the use-case for a Desktop App to stream music? Even with the webapp you can download music for offline play.

> you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got that isn't on Spotify you can have anywhere you're logged into your YT Music account.

FYI you can also do this with Spotify[0].

[Ø]: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/

I don't think that's the same, is it? That's just Spotify letting you play files on your local device. With YT Music you upload them from one device to the YT Music cloud, and then any device can access them/stream from the YT Cloud. You can't upload your music to Spotify, only use it to access media that's stored locally on your device.

Last time I tried, I was able to load the local file on desktop, and then sync that playlist on mobile (to listen to the "desktop song" on mobile even when offline). So I'd argue it provided similar functionality.

Spotify seems to rely more on cross-device sync. As the name of the feature suggests, it depends on having the actual media file stored locally. In contrast, YouTube Music stores everything in the cloud.

Local files work fine if you're always playing music on devices you own and that have local storage. But if you're using media devices like a Chromecast (unless you're casting directly from a device that has access to the local files), or on machines where you don’t have sync privileges—like a work computer—YouTube Music will work, but Spotify won’t.

I pay for both because YT Music sucks, a lot.

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