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by pavanky 2098 days ago
It is worth it just for the amount of Youtube I watch. May be other people are OK with the ads, but I am not. I bought the youtube premium subscription 4-5 years ago (even before it was a bundle) and am not disappointed.

I still have other subscriptions too (spotify, hbo, etc). I dont see them as competing with each other.

2 comments

Barely anyone is OK with the ads, people just use uBlock in their browser and YouTube Vanced on their android phones. Or suffer, if they're not tech-inclined.
I use uBlock on my laptop. At some point 90% of my youtube watching moved to TV. Yes I could have built a pi-hole or something.

But for $10/month (which it was back then) I was totally fine paying for it.

Don't bother with pihole, too much work and setup. Get nextdns and update your home routers DNS to point to there's and voilĂ  a pihole in the cloud!
Is there a reason to use spotify instead of youtube music?
I ask myself this a lot as someone who pays for both Spotify and Youtube Premium (which includes Youtube Music).

Youtube music has all of the music ever posted on youtube which is nice because it means you can generally find almost anything there (even obscure stuff not on Spotify). Unfortunately this can also make it harder to find what you are looking for, youtube music is full of low quality user submitted covers/remixes of songs that I don't want to hear but sometimes it plays anyways. Sometimes youtube music will have versions of songs that were really meant to accompany a music video and not the standalone song itself which is annoying to say the least.

The app is also far less capable as a standalone music app. Never has any lyrics, this weird concept of switching between video and audio, hard to view all fo the work of a particular artist/group on one page, no continuity between mobile and desktop a la Spotify. The hand curated playlists are also updated less than the ones on Spotify. Interestingly the machine generated recommendations from Spotify have also always been much better than that of Youtube Music, which is strange given how good Youtubes video recommendation algorithm has gotten in recent years.

On top of all of this I have been using Spotify since 2013; I have a massive amount of music in my library there that I have no way of porting over to Youtube Music.

The last time I checked Youtube music was terrible and didnt handle playlists well. I was on Google play (bundled with youtube premium) for the longest time and then when they stopped support for Google music in favor of youtube music, I wanted to give spotify a try.

Now that you mentioned it I looked at youtube music again and it looks much better. I might want to try it out and cancel spotify (although I dont know if my wife would come away from spotify).