I don’t want to use YouTube Music even though I pay for it

A few months ago, Google and YouTube realized I no longer live in Lebanon and told me I couldn’t pay just $9 per month for the Lebanese Family Premium account. I faced the music and instead switched to a two-person French Premium subscription for €19.99 per month – more than double what I was initially paying.

Of course, this made me wonder whether it was worth it, but also whether I wanted to continue paying for Spotify Duo, which has been my favorite music streaming service for over 18 years. But given the YouTube Music access included in my now very expensive premium subscription, I had to ask myself the question. And the answer, as I soon discovered, was very simple: I don’t want to use YouTube Music, even for “free.”

If there’s one issue that makes me switch my music completely to YouTube Music, it’s that the service isn’t as comprehensive as Spotify. For now, it’s more or less accessible through all my devices, but in a limited capacity. There’s direct integration with my Google Home and Nest speakers, my Android phone and tablet, but only a web app for my iMac and my Google TV streamer, while Spotify has native apps for both. Even my helmet-shaped Ikea Vappeby Bluetooth speaker has a dedicated Spotify tap button to start playing without pulling out my phone, but I have to use my phone to play music from YouTube.

However, it doesn’t stop there. YouTube Music doesn’t have native apps for PlayStation, so you can’t stream music while playing games as you’ll have to use the main YouTube app instead. It doesn’t have any apps for Roku TVs and streaming devices, it’s not available on Peloton or Rivian cars, and it doesn’t have direct integration with known speaker brands like Bose, Yamaha, or Denon. Even the Apple Watch app doesn’t allow offline downloads, while Spotify does.

It’s such a big difference that it makes me very wary of taking the leap. Music is essential to me, and I would like to be able to access it on all my devices. Spotify is so universal and so widely adopted that I have a solid guarantee that no matter what device I have now or what I buy in the future, it will be supported. YouTube Music is several steps away from giving me that guarantee – if Google can’t even make a desktop app for it, what can I expect from other companies?

So no matter how much it makes financial sense for me to leave Spotify and add my music to my existing YouTube Premium subscription, it just doesn’t make common sense. I may have to restrict what devices I buy in the future because of this, or limit how much or what music I can access. I am not a fan of his. Also, do I have any guarantee that Google won’t discontinue this service in a year or two? Not good.

Spotify Connect has become essential to the way I experience music. I have a lot of devices that can actually play music, but obviously I have my own preferences. At my desk, music plays through my Pixel tablet, but I don’t want to reach out to touch the display every time I want to interact with it, so I use the Spotify app on my iMac while I work to control the music playing on my tablet. It just makes sense.

When I’m cooking and playing music through the living room soundbar, I use the controls on my Pixel Watch to skip or rewind songs or the like. When I’m in a cafe or on the train or at the airport and have music playing in my earbuds, I can use my MacBook or phone to control the music.

I realize this is not necessary for many people. If you only have a few devices, this feature might not be necessary, but for me and my two computers, two tablets, seven or so phones, two smart TVs, and five smart speakers? It is liberating.

My queue moves with me, my current listening history also moves with me. I don’t have to think about which device I’m looking at or which device is actually playing the music – everything is part of the same unified experience. This isn’t something I’ve ever experienced with YouTube Music, sadly, despite knowing that Google has made good progress in recent months to improve it. You can now resume playback from any device, which is a nice improvement, but it’s a far cry from the Spotify Connect experience of letting any app instance act as a remote control for any device.

Am I holding my breath for Google to implement a proper Connect equivalent in YouTube Music? No, and who knows, maybe there are patents and restrictions that mean this can never happen.

Whenever the topic of Spotify vs YouTube Music comes up, I look at YouTube Music on my phone and find new reasons why I don’t want to switch to it. Putting aside the fact that all my playlists and the ones I follow are on Spotify, I simply can’t use a music service that doesn’t allow me to sort playlists by artist, name, or date added. How is this still not in YouTube Music?

I heavily use playlist folders to organize my playlists in Spotify, but that’s not something YouTube Music offers. I have to just list playlists like that, without any sense of organization? No.

I use several tricks to prevent Spotify from recommending bad music to me and sometimes to listen to bad music without affecting my main algorithm, and YouTube Music has no equivalent to this. For private sessions I have to disable search and listening history, then remember to enable them. There’s no such thing as skipping songs to someone else’s playlist. And there’s no way to exclude something like kid- or pet-friendly playlists from your taste profile. You also can’t completely block artists you don’t like. I don’t want to use a music service that is built around recommendations and relies solely on algorithms to guess without giving me manual keys to send strong signals about my preferences.

And don’t get me confused by the fact that YouTube Music exists within YouTube, so whatever artists I follow, or the music I like, completely impacts my video watching experience. The music you love fills your history, your subscriptions, your searches, etc. I don’t care about music videos; I watch cooking, interior design, sports, travel and comedy videos on YouTube. I’ll listen to Sabaton every day, but I won’t watch their videos, and I don’t understand why the two have to be linked together. I found a way to get around this by creating a separate YouTube channel for music, but I hate that we have to do that, or that I have to keep switching profiles on my computer and Google TV to go between my YouTube and my YouTube Music because I had the ridiculously smart idea of ​​keeping them separate.

There is so much more. I could list a whole list of reasons why YouTube Music doesn’t work for me in its current state. Google is improving this, and I know there are a lot of people who absolutely swear by YouTube Music and have switched to it without any regrets. I know radio and recommendations are potentially better than Spotify. But for my money? I will continue to pay for it as part of my premium subscription and won’t use it, then move to Spotify instead. I have the green devil.