YouTube Music has been Google's de facto music streaming service for about a year now. It's had months to catch up with updates and new features, polishing up the flawed-but-promising app that we reviewed a year ago.
Has Google used its time well to craft YouTube Music into the perfect blend of audio and visual music streaming?
Nope. But let's dig in and find out why.
Setting up and using YouTube Music hasn't fundamentally changed much. Sign in with your Google account and you'll be prompted to select some artists that you like. Picking artists continues to show more similar artists that you might also like, which should eventually narrow things down so Google has a fine-tuned taste profile of what you like to listen to. Pretty basic stuff, and it works pretty well.
And once again, you're dumped into your Home view. This is where Google's algorithms and recommendations should really shine.
Algorithms and recommendations
You'll get tons of recommendations based on artists in your library and taste profile, plus similar artists and music. If you like Alice in Chains, there's a good chance that you'll also like Soundgarden. This is something that Google and others have done for a while, and it still works well here.
Scrolling through the Home feed seems to show where Google has made most of the quiet-yet-important changes, as the recommendations past that are significantly better than they used to be. If you give the app location permissions it can figure out what you like to listen to, and when. So if you typically like to jam out to mellow songs on Tuesday mornings, you're going to get recommendations for that if you're at home and it's Tuesday. You'll also get suggestions based on the weather, what other people are listening to in similar situations, and more. This is a feature that was originally introduced in Google Play Music and was supposed to be in the original iteration of YouTube Music, but it's working much, much better than it used to.
Other playlist recommendations also seem to be a little bit smarter, even if they need a little more work. Most of mine are filled with sort of similar music, like the All-time Essentials row showing a lot of different flavors of rock music. Some country playlists still seem to end up mixed in and I don't really know how that happened, but it's another marked area of improvement.
You'll also be shown live performances and music videos that you may be interested in. The live performances thing is really cool and is a natural integration from the video side of YouTube, and probably one of my favorite features of YouTube Music. But here's where that video stuff can really gum up your recommendations, since everything is co-mingled.
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I've watched YouTube videos that involved All Star by Smashmouth, usually in the form of something Shrek-related. 99% of the time, I'm not really watching those videos because I'm a big Smashmouth fan. YouTube doesn't care, though; they see that it's a “music” video, and now I get Smashmouth recommendations pretty frequently. Do I really want to see Smashmouth playing a live song? No, not really. But I also don't want to actively avoid a funny video I saw on Reddit because it'll mess up my music service. It's basically just YouTube's questionable recommendation algorithm applies to your music library.
Library management is a mess
Managing your library of tunes is one of the most important aspects of a music service, at least to me. Google Play Music did an excellent job by allowing you to upload your own music, then freely add music from Google's catalog. You can still edit metadata, control your library, make smart playlists, and more, but pretty much all of that is absent from YouTube Music.
To be fair, that's actually pretty close to how Spotify does things. You save albums and songs to your library, but if there's a typo on anything or you just want to change the genre, you're stuck. You get what the official upload says, and that's it. It's more of a bookmark than a collection.
But on the back end, Spotify is only working with one library, while Google is working with two. Any artists you save or subscribe to will also be in your regular YouTube subscriptions, and vice versa, if those channels are marked as artists. I do follow some guitar-related channels on YouTube, and that stuff very quickly bleeds into the YouTube Music library, while saving artists in YouTube Music clogs up my subscriptions and fills up my recommended videos with music videos and other things. I primarily use YouTube for gaming, tech, and review videos, and pretty rarely as my source of music, so fully utilizing YouTube Music's library would be a disaster for my main YouTube feed.
This was something I'd hoped Google would have found a solution for, but it's just as bad as when the service launched. As it is, YouTube Music is a place for you to casually look up some songs you want to hear, check out playlists, and bookmark the things that you really like. It's not at all set up to be your music library, at least not if you care about using regular YouTube.
YouTube also has a 5000 song limit on playlists, which seems astronomically high and no one would ever hit that limit. You'd be right, except your liked songs are also a playlist. If you do just bookmark the songs you really like, like I just suggested, you'll eventually hit a point where you can no longer “like” more music. This also shares your liked videos playlist, so if you have a long history of liking YouTube videos, you're gonna have a problem. It's a huge case of trying to form-fit a music service onto a platform that really wasn't made for it.
You also still can't upload your own music, so if you can't find it on YouTube, you are straight out of luck. YouTube Music has recently added the ability to play local files on your device, so if you have a file downloaded on your phone from somewhere else, it'll work in a pinch. If you use multiple devices, though, things get messy.
Everything else
YouTube Music has still undergone some upgrades over the past year, including Android Auto integration, some slight UI redesign, and it's been given a free tier on Google Home devices. It's better than it was, but just barely.
The mixtape feature is still really cool, because it'll download tracks for you to save offline to always have, but it's so finicky about re-authenticating that you actually have a subscription and then erasing everything and redownloading everything from scratch.
To clarify on that, yes, YouTube frequently erases your offline music, and the redownloads things just to pass authentication. It makes sense, because YouTube's library can change on a dime with piracy issues, rightsholders pulling music, and more, but man, it's frustrating. I hope you have unlimited data if you're using this.
The hotlist section in the app still focuses just on what's popular with no input on what music you like, and stuff like that still seeps into your recommendations every once in a while. I'm a big fan of music discovery, but I generally like that to be done by recommending similar music, not something completely different from the rest of my library.
Audio quality still is still pretty iffy, which is another issue from the service pulling its tracks from YouTube uploads. Google also has no plans to deliver high-resolution lossless streaming, either, although I'm hesitant to dock points for that because it's a pretty rare thing, anyway.
Google says their music service is growing, and paid YouTube subscriptions have over 15 million users, but I still really don't know how much YouTube Music is driving that. Google does say that they've grown subscriptions 60% year-over-year from last year, but that's also much easier to do when your numbers are low to begin with.
I want to like YouTube Music, but as an avid YouTube user and someone with a huge, but separate, music library, the current state of things just makes that nearly impossible. The things it does well, like always having some offline music on deck to listen to, and the tight integration of music videos, live performances, and everything else, are really cool, but they just aren't enough to cover up the shoddy framework that the entire app is built on. I'd say give them another year, but we just might have another music app by then. This one might even have a messaging app built in.
I have a huge library in my Play Music but whenever I ask Home to play an album from that Library (music I own and have uploaded), it insists on looking for it on YouTube music. The whole system is broken. I will say “Hey Google, play this track by this artist from my Library”. And, I know it’s heard me because I can see the exact words on the screen and it will say, “Sure here’s some song on Youtube that isn’t remotely like what I heard”.
Infuriating,
Pure ass. Missing music, missing features, buggy, no WearOS support, no importing of my old library. Who knows how long they’ll stick with this one. I’m over it. At least Spotify will still be around in a few years.
“YouTube Music clogs up my subscriptions and fills up my recommended videos with music videos and other things”
Exactly. Google wants Youtube and Youtube Music to be complimentary of each other but for many people they serve two completely different purposes. Stop trying to merge the two together. Yes many songs have videos and yes some videos are songs. But the Venn Diagram of these two services has a very small overlap in the grand scheme of things.
It can replace Google play music, I switched and it’s way better. Took a week before it started getting music I like and to get used to the UI but I have no regrets switching. Issue is people don’t like to let go of what they are used to
It’s not a problem of letting go of what I’m used to. If it were simple a UI overhaul of Google Play Music, I wouldn’t be all that angered by the move. But Google took a perfectly functional music service and set it aside. and in its place, advertised a shell of a music service that offers a fraction of the features GPM had. One of the biggest of which was to upload my own music and manage the library. I have a lot of stuff that can’t be found in Youtube Music. yeah i can put all of it on my phone now and play it locally. but it’s 2019 and we have the cloud. i’m tired of people/companies half-assed doing things and saying it’s good enough when the technology to do it the right way has been around for over a decade.
Normally I do try to be really open minded and not get stuck using things just because it’s what I’m used to, but I really don’t think this fits that situation. As others have mentioned, there are some legitimately important features still lacking (library management, music uploads, music store, etc) and the new features that have been introduced aren’t really replacements. It’s a service serving a totally different demographic, but Google is selling it to the same demographic that GPM served.
I’ve found that Apple Music is really the closest thing to GPM. Spotify still lacks a lot of the library management features, but Apple Music seems to have an alternative to every GPM feature that we’re all missing.