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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is apparently #1 in music streaming as well, which I found surprising.

so did I until I found myself using YouTube music over Spotify more and more. it has all the standard music but also includes more remixes and smaller artists. the most important thing is that it doesn't mix podcasts in with music and you can easily view your own playlists!

haven't used Spotify in any meaningful way in a few years now.

Same. Also, my Spotify auto generated playlists hadn't changed for several years. I finally got fed up and googled around only to find it was a known issue. Clearly somebody realized they could just turn off those expensive GPUs...

The reason I've always used YouTube Music over the competition is that it includes whatever-the-hell anyone uploads on YouTube.

So, while Spotify can't get the rights (or the data) for that band that played down the pub one time in 1987, someone happened to record them and put them on YouTube and now they have royalties sat accruing somewhere and I get to listen to them on a nostalgia binge.

In terms of subscribers or actual use?

I have YT Premium, so I automatically get YT Music. I would much rather pay less and drop the Music app. I almost never use it and don’t like it. I can’t justify buying for another service on top of this, so I went back to managing a local library and manually syncing all my music to my phone like it’s 2007.

A side effect of YouTube treating music special is that I can’t read comments on the TV for videos that it thinks are music. I find this very annoying. The same video will have comment on mobile or the computer.

IIRC, it was in terms of use.

My gripe is that when you try to sync over a library from, say, Spotify, you’ll end up subscribed to hundreds of artist’s YouTube channels in your main TV app, and playlists are basically shared too. Which I do not want at all

Yep. This is one of the reasons I don’t really use YT Music. The shared playlists are a nightmare. If someone tells me to check out a song, I might go there to listen to it as a one-off, but that’s about it. It’s so poorly done for anyone who also uses YouTube, which I assume is everyone.

Quick tip: You can see the comments on such videos (at least on my TV), the comments button not shown but clicking on the video title to open the description also shows the comments.

YT Music arguably has a much larger library than any of its mainstream competitors (since it can also draw from music videos uploaded to Youtube).

Also, better audio quality in my subjective opinion.

Went to a wedding, 10 years ago even, and the "kids" DJ-ing the wedding party were pulling up music on YouTube.

(To be sure, this was very much a low-key affair, teens there with their parents were "DJ-ing" — but I was still surprised that is was YT. Just vanilla YT, pulling up "videos" and hitting "play".)

YouTube is pretty common for in-person, social music sharing because it's the least friction. It's hard to share between Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, and personal collections from the same device. YT search will usually find pretty much everything.

It's because most music in on youtube, and the audio quality is good enough for the average joe running bluetooth speakers or whatever, and it's free+usable without an acount unlike all the other music services. Free is the most important part.

YT Music is a dollar cheaper than Spotify, and generally better; it's also included in YT Premium, so if you already have that, 'may as well'.

I dont believe that is the case, and I cant any reference to it. Nearly all are pointing to Spotify as number one both in terms of revenue and market shares.

The thing I dislike about Youtube Music is how it is basically not a product the team have put any thoughts into it. It is constantly rated one of the worst in Apple Music and Spotify comparison. It has so much potential but it is just very poor done.

I always wondered if this would be the case. All non-tech-nerd people I know share Spotify links that I can't open (yes, I can download another app, no I'm not going to do that).

I use Youtube extensively for discovering new music and new artists. Sometimes (1 out of 100 times) I find myself on Soundcloud for a song that's not on Youtube, but for the rest Youtube is just perfect. I always wondered how many people use Youtube for music streaming... apparently a lot.

Not surprising, Youtube has tracks that Spotify does not. Live stuff, unofficial bootlegs, out of print B-sides, the lot. Some are "official" but many are user-uploaded. Youtube has enough legal power to keep those online I suppose, where smaller operations like Grooveshark did not.

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