[danShumway]

> One tier, all the features.

That is literally my complaint with it, that's exactly what I said. You can not pay Youtube specifically to remove ads.

What do you want me to back up here, you're agreeing with me about what the product is: it's a music/video streaming service that contains ad-free viewing on the side. Do you want evidence that ad-free viewing through Youtube premium is worse than with adblockers? That's pretty straightforward to provide; just look at the experience of Youtube's official apps vs NewPipe, interruptions between computers, lack of anonymous viewing -- it straightforwardly factually supports fewer viewing options than adblockers do.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be happy with the service if you like it, I'm saying that if a company is bundling a Spotify alternative with their ad-free option and requiring you to pay for both, then they're not offering an ad-free option on its own.

And that's especially the case if the company did offer an ad-free option in the past and then stopped offering it. I think it's extremely reasonable to theorize about why a company might make that decision.

[squeaky-clean]

> is bundling a Spotify alternative with their ad-free option and requiring you to pay for both

It's literally just youtube without the video component. You can find everything song ever on youtube as a video. This is just saving you bandwidth and battery. It would be more expensive for them to offer ad-free youtube without the music-only component, because people would still use it to listen to music, but now with video attached to every song.

> lack of anonymous viewing

How is anonymous viewing possible with paid accounts? They need to know if you're a subscriber or not. Even services that aim for anonymity like Mullvad require you to login with your user id to use it. Should there be a "trust me, I'm a paid subscriber" button? You can just delete watched videos from your history.

[danShumway]

> This is just saving you bandwidth and battery. It would be more expensive for them to offer ad-free youtube without the music-only component, because people would still use it to listen to music, but now with video attached to every song.

I think you're oversimplifying Youtube Music (and ignoring that Youtube Premium does include exclusive content), but assuming it is just Youtube without a video stream -- does it strike you as odd at all that the inclusion of a cost-saving feature would cause an increase in the price of the service for customers? Does that make you doubt at all whether or not this product is priced around the actual cost of ad-free content?

> How is anonymous viewing possible with paid accounts?

There are ways to do this using things like blinded tokens, but to fair they're complicated and Google is unlikely to pursue them. It does get at the inherent tradeoff here -- the way Google has structured Youtube Premium it is impossible to use it in a privacy preserving way.

And I think even ignoring the other problems with Youtube Premium and even ignoring the bundling issues, there is a little bit of a disingenuous nature to these arguments of "don't like ads, just pay" when everyone understands that by the very nature of the product, paying does not remove many of the negative aspects of Google advertising that people are trying to avoid.

In a way, I'm being overly charitable here; Google bundles ad-free viewing as part of an extended package, but the other problem that I didn't complain about is that buying that package literally doesn't get rid of entire problem and in fact requires you to use Youtube in a way that makes the problem worse, because at least when you're signed out your data isn't getting quite so explicitly linked to you as an individual.