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

A few months ago, Google and YouTube realized that I no longer lived in Lebanon and told me I couldn’t skate on paying just $9 per month for a Lebanese family Premium account. I had to face the music and switch to a two-person French Premium subscription for €19.99 per month instead — 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 keep paying for Spotify Duo, too, which had been my music streaming service of choice for over 18 years. But considering the included YouTube Music access in my now very expensive Premium subscription, I had to ask myself the question. And the answer, as I soon realized, was very easy: I just don’t want to use YouTube Music, even for “free.”

YouTube Music isn’t “everywhere” the same way Spotify is

If there’s one hang-up I have around completely switching my music listening to YouTube Music, it’s that the service is not as widespread 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 phones and tablets, but there’s only a web app for my iMac and my Google TV Streamer, whereas 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 up my phone, but I have to use my phone to play music from YouTube.

It doesn’t stop there, though. YouTube Music doesn’t have native apps for the PlayStation, so you can’t stream music while you play a game because you have to use the main YouTube app instead. It doesn’t have an app for Roku TVs and streaming devices, isn’t available on Peloton or Rivian cars, and doesn’t have direct integrations with known speaker brands like Bose, Yamaha, or Denon. Even the Apple Watch app doesn’t allow offline downloads, while Spotify does.

It’s this huge difference that makes me very wary of making the jump. Music is essential to me, and I’d like to be able to access it on all my devices. Spotify is so universal and so widely adopted that I have a near guarantee that no matter which devices I have now or which ones I will buy in the future, it will be supported. YouTube Music is many steps away from giving me that guarantee — if Google can’t even build a desktop app for it, what do I even expect from other companies?

So no matter how much it makes financial sense for me to just ditch Spotify and consolidate my music into my existing YouTube Premium subscription, it’s just not common sense. I’d have to restrict which devices I buy in the future because of that, or limit where I can limit to music or how. I’m not a fan of that. Also, do I have any guarantees that Google won’t ditch the service in a year or two? Well, no.

Spotify Connect is still unmatched

Spotify Connect has become essential to the way I experience music. I have so many devices that can actually play music, but I obviously have 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 working to control the music playing on my tablet. It just makes sense.

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

I realize this isn’t essential for many people. If you only have a couple of devices, this feature won’t be essential, but to me and my two computers, two tablets, seven or so phones, two smart TVs, and five smart speakers? It is liberating.

My queue follows along, my current listening history follows too. I don’t have to think about what device I’m looking at or which one is actually playing the music — everything is part of the same unified experience. It’s not something I’ve ever experienced with YouTube Music, sadly, despite knowing that Google has made good strides in recent months to improve this. You can now resume playback from any device, which is a cool improvement, but it’s far from the Spotify Connect experience of having any app instance act as a remote control for any device.

Am I holding out 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 it never could.

YouTube Music vs Spotify, beyond the simple features

Every time the topic of Spotify versus YouTube Music comes up, I go through YouTube Music on my phone and discover new reasons why I wouldn’t want to switch to it. Put aside the fact that all my playlists and the people I follow are on Spotify, I simply can’t use a music service that doesn’t let me sort playlists by artist, name, or date added. How is this still not a thing in YouTube Music?

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

I use multiple tricks to stop Spotify from recommending bad music to me, and sometimes to listen to bad music without letting it affect my main algorithm, and YouTube Music has no equivalent to that. Private sessions require me to disable searching and listening history, then remember to enable them. There’s no such thing as skipping songs in someone else’s playlist. And no way to exclude something like a kid- or pet-friendly playlist from your taste profile. You can’t even completely block artists you don’t like. I don’t want to use a music service that is built around recommendations and only relies on the algorithm to guess without giving me manual keys to send strict signals about my preferences.

And don’t get me started on the fact that YouTube Music exists within YouTube, so any artists I follow, or music I like, completely affects my video-watching experience. Your liked music populates your history, your subscriptions, your search, and so on. 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 entwined. I found a trick to avoid it 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 computers and Google TVs to move between my YouTube and my YouTube Music because I had the ridiculously smart idea to keep them separate.

There’s more. I can catalog an entire list of reasons why YouTube Music doesn’t just work for me in its current state. Google has been improving it, and I know there are a lot of people who absolutely swear by YouTube Music and made the switch with zero regrets. I know the radio and recommendations are potentially better than Spotify. But for my money? I’ll keep paying for it as part of my Premium membership and not use it, then go to Spotify instead. The green devil has me.