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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

YouTube music isn't really a different service rather than a different YouTube app. Under the hood YouTube music is just YouTube with a music player UI. Taking it away wouldn't really lower the cost much.

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That's part of the problem with YouTube Music. I tried to use it, but having music playlists clutter up my video playlists is pretty terrible, among other things.

I find it hard to justify paying for 2 music streaming services, so I cancelled Apple Music, because I'm paying for YouTube Music through Premium. However, I don't like it, so I'm back to manually managing a local music library in Apple's Music app. This is probably a better long-term approach than renting access to a music library on a monthly basis.

But that's my point, YouTube music isn't really a music streaming service, it's just YouTube premium.

The whole "YouTube music free!" is just marketing and a music focused app wrapped on YouTube.

YouTube premium without YouTube music would be pretty much the same cost.

That may be their internal justification, but due to their marketing, it feels like I’m forced to buy two things, when I only ever wanted one. This is why people have been asking for a YouTube Premium Lite, and what they delivered isn’t what anyone asking really wanted.

What people are asking for isn't viable, and people are confused. That's what I am explaining here.

YouTube premium would not be any cheaper without YouTube music. It's a marketing gimmick.

I understand what you’re saying, but the point still stands. YouTube has positioned this as a 2 for 1 value, that people don’t see value in. The optics are bad. It might be technically valid, but that’s irrelevant when it comes to consumer sentiment, especially when YouTube itself framed it this way.

Can I ask what you mean by "having music playlists clutter up my video playlists? I use YT music (along with my local music library) specifically because it uses YouTube content - which means that all sorts of live / niche / otherwise hard to find music is there. However, my YouTube music playlists are not visible on "regular YouTube".

I made playlists in YouTube Music, and when I went to save videos to playlists on YouTube, it would show everything. Without making some kind of naming convention with prefixes, it was hard to know what was from YouTube Music and what was from YouTube. I just had to remember, which gets harder as the number of playlists increased. This dissuaded me from using more than 1 or 2 playlists, which limited the overall value of the service.

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