More people are listening to music than ever before. What was once a hobby that required you to search for and purchase CDs from your favorite artists is now as easy as opening an app on your phone. There are many apps for this. Spotify is the most popular, while Apple Music offers a more premium alternative. Each app has a fairly large music library and some exclusive perks, with no app being objectively better than all the others.
However, these small differences can be deal-breakers for different users. For many, there are many reasons why you should switch to YouTube Music, as the app has some features that Spotify and Apple Music don’t offer. Although the app still doesn’t support lossless audio like Apple Music, YouTube Music’s benefits include a larger catalog, more features available for free, better paid plans, and some other perks unique to YouTube Music.
1. Experience on the free version
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These days, everything comes with a recurring subscription. You rarely own a copy of an app, and even free apps have premium versions. Spotify and YouTube Music are both free but lock important features behind their premium tiers, while Apple Music only has a paid version.
Not everyone wants to spend more money every month just to listen to music, which is why it’s important to figure out which music streaming app has the best free version. Spotify has long been known for being notoriously cruel to its free users. The app previously only allowed six hops per hour, and while that restriction has been relaxed somewhat thanks to limited on-demand listening time, other reasons to ditch Spotify still exist. You can’t rewind, forward, or search for a timestamp in a song, for example. You can’t even exclusively listen to songs in your playlists, because Spotify automatically adds recommended songs into your shuffle.
YouTube Music users don’t face many of these restrictions. You can rewind and search for songs and videos just like you can on normal YouTube, and there are no skip limits. You also don’t add songs to your playlist and you can listen to the songs in your playlist in order, unlike Spotify, where you are forced to use Smart Shuffle. Additionally, although both apps contain ads, YouTube Music’s are skippable and much shorter. One important thing to consider is that the free version of YouTube Music does not allow you to listen to songs in the background or with the phone screen off, unlike Spotify.
2. More value on the premium
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YouTube Music has a pretty good free plan, without the lack of background playback. If you want access to this feature or are generally willing to spend a few dollars each month for a better experience, it’s important to compare the different features offered by Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music for their premium versions.
Premium for a single user costs $12.99 per month on Spotify, $11.99 for YouTube Music, and $10.99 for Apple Music. That already makes YouTube Music a better deal than Spotify, but when you factor in student discounts, the app goes down to $5.99 — the same as Apple Music with a student discount, a dollar less than Spotify’s $6.99. Other plans are similarly priced, and while the difference of a dollar may seem small each month, it can add up over time.
Apple Music is even cheaper than YouTube Music, but only if you’re talking about music streaming. One of the many things people don’t know about YouTube Premium is that it also includes YouTube Music Premium. As such, you can purchase YouTube Premium for $15.99 for a solo user or $8.99 for students, and you get no ads on your YouTube videos in addition to ad-free music streaming and many other features you get with the paid tier of YouTube Music.
3. A much larger collection of things to listen to
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Whether it’s Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music, each app offers a huge collection of content that you can choose to listen to. This includes your favorite songs, all the latest releases, old-school albums and even podcasts. However, if you really want the largest collection of songs or regularly listen to niche content, YouTube Music is vastly superior to all the alternatives available.
This is because YouTube Music, like YouTube itself, offers user-submitted content, giving it more freedom over what it can present to its users. This includes content from labels that are unwilling or simply unable to license their music to streaming platforms, indie video game songs that the creator has never uploaded to a streaming site, remixes of existing titles and much more.
Aside from streaming music, the app’s podcast catalog is also unparalleled. You can only play content that creators upload specifically to Apple Music and Spotify on either app, while YouTube Music’s catalog features over 20 years of YouTube content that you can listen to in the background.
4. Better support for your favorite artists
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Supporting your favorite artists was simple in the past. You buy their albums and CDs, get merchandise and attend their concerts. It’s much more complex when streaming platforms come into play. Each platform pays the artist in exchange for profits from people using their platform to listen to the artist, but the rates and payment terms differ.
Spotify, for example, has a complex bundled royalty structure where artists receive an average of $0.004 per stream. This may not seem like much, but it ends up being a lot with millions of streams. YouTube Music pays a much higher average of $0.007 per stream, almost double what Spotify makes. Apple Music claims to pay even more, with the company stating in 2021 that the average is $0.01 per stream. However, new estimates from Velveteen put this figure between a claimed $0.006 and $0.01.
5. Free Cloud Storage
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Music streaming apps and cloud storage don’t usually go hand in hand; you cannot use Spotify servers to store your local music. However, YouTube Music allows it, as you can effortlessly upload your local audio files to YouTube Music using your browser.
If you have copies of songs that are not available online, you can upload them to a private cloud and listen to them from any of your devices. This serves as both a way to increase your song collection and also as a secondary backup, as you can upload your own audio files. Additionally, YouTube Music doesn’t show you ads when you listen to music you’ve downloaded yourself, and unlike how you usually listen to songs on its free version, you can play them in the background and with the screen off.
To upload files to YouTube Music, open it in a browser, click your profile icon, then select Upload Music from the drop-down list. You can then drag and drop or choose the files you want to upload to the cloud and then access them from any device, as long as you use the same Google account to do so. You can download up to 100,000 personal songs this way, which means you won’t encounter a download limit anytime soon – or at all. Note that while Spotify also has the option to upload songs to the app, these are not saved to the cloud. You can only listen to them on the device you downloaded them from, and deleting the files locally also deletes them from Spotify. Apple Music, on the other hand, offers the same features as YouTube Music but you must be a subscriber.
