I've Been Sleeping on YouTube Music
Every time I try to get further away from Google, they find a way to dig its claws in. This time it's with YouTube Music, a service I've always been reluctant to give much of a chance.
I've been a bit of a lost soul the last few years, and I decided I was going to drop Spotify. This was some time in 2024, and I dedicated the entire year of 2025 to Apple Music.
My year devoid of discovery
Apple Music, by and large, is pretty great. I didn't feel like I was missing out much in terms of selection. Where I felt the burden though, was with music discovery. An entire year went by and I felt like I hadn't discovered any new music.
Music discovery was what I loved the most about Spotify. But also, the rumblings that they were seeding lists with AI slop made it hard to stick with them. Then there was the matter of Spotify possibly engaging in payola (pay for play) which made it easier for me to drop them.
Doesn't help that I have personal beef with them. I had an album pulled from the service for fake streams. Streams that were all coming from a playlist for some "pay for plays" service that I absolutely didn't sign up for.
My convictions haven't been strong enough to flat out abandon the platform.
There and back again
That all said, the year of no discovery with Apple Music came to an end. I moved back to Spotify because it's what I knew. Having field stripped my Spotify account before leaving, it was like I was starting fresh. I thought this was going to be a good thing.
Turns out, coming back and starting from next to nothing was pretty abysmal. I expected to run into so many new artists as I fed the algorithm my likes and dislikes. Turns out they kept just serving up the same bands, nearly all of which were larger / major-label acts.
Here comes a new challenger
Then I had somebody mention YouTube Music to me. Wasn't the first time it's come up, but I liked what they said about the music discovery aspect of things. Turns out the other person I knew that used it was quite the audiophile with eclectic tastes. I probably would have listened to him back then.
Fast forward a couple months into my foray into YouTube Music. I'm still getting used to things, and it's not all rainbows and unicorns, but it's pretty damn close.
Music discovery, my top priority, has been fantastic. I think mostly due to Google's algorithmic prowess. A lot of the new artists I'm finding are on the smaller side, so anecdotally, it doesn't seem like Google is prioritizing major labels or anything like that.
This is also the small caveat I've had with the platform. I do occasionally run into major-label artists' songs posted by random usernames or artist names that aren't the original artist. Unsure if that's just the same flea market magic as the Android app store, or just legit piracy or redistribution of copyrighted works on the platform.
Back to the positives, no complaints related to the breadth of artists available. I've yet to punch in some obscure artist and come up empty-handed. Also, since I uploaded my CD collection to YouTube years ago, I have all of my extremely underground tunes available too.
A square peg that actually fits
One of my favorite features is being able to make a playlist from a prompt. I hate every app having "AI" bolted on, but this feature makes sense. You can toss in something rambling like "Looking for deep cuts, reminiscent of a rainy day in some city, featuring bands like this one that I already like" and you'll get a pretty solid playlist from that.
Most of the time the playlists are about an hour in length. I was able to coax a 14 hour playlist out of it with a pretty vague prompt though.
As I've been singing the praises of YouTube Music to my peer group, the matter of "yet another subscription" came up. It is true, you may need another subscription. I hate ads, and my family loves YouTube, so we've had a YouTube Premium plan for a while now.
YouTube Music comes bundled with the YouTube Premium plan. This was also the case during my year of Apple Music, as we already have an Apple One plan for Apple TV and Apple Arcade.
Turns out Spotify is the "extra" subscription, as I can't seem to get the wife or kid off of it. Regardless of their reluctance, I've been enjoying YouTube Music and all of the new music I've been discovering.