News I finally switched from YouTube Music to Spotify, but I wanna go back

[AC News]

Highlighting my experience switching to Spotify and what I miss about YouTube Music.

I finally switched from YouTube Music to Spotify, but I wanna go back : Read more

 

[nobodymove]

Two glaring downsides of YouTube Music that frustrate me are the low quality streaming and lack of "direct play" integrations with speaker and amplifier systems. It's actually hard to listen to YTM if you have high quality headphones or speakers. The lack of detail and fidelity is all you pay attention to. Also, my AVR has high quality direct play integrations for Spotify and Tidal. Nothing for YouTube Music. It's hard to justify paying for two services when you want ad-free YouTube, but it's necessary if you have even a mediocre audio setup. I really wish YTM would up the quality.

 

[Trvbone]

You forgot the availability of comments on songs I love it

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Spotify definitely has better sound and an infinitely better discovery. Google just plays the same things. Also back when they bundled it with YouTube it was worth the cost.
Since they have just dismantled it. It's a substantial downgrade from GPM. My advice, never become attached to anything Google and simply use 3rd party to begin with.

 

[Derrek Lee]

Two glaring downsides of YouTube Music that frustrate me are the low quality streaming and lack of "direct play" integrations with speaker and amplifier systems. It's actually hard to listen to YTM if you have high quality headphones or speakers. The lack of detail and fidelity is all you pay attention to. Also, my AVR has high quality direct play integrations for Spotify and Tidal. Nothing for YouTube Music. It's hard to justify paying for two services when you want ad-free YouTube, but it's necessary if you have even a mediocre audio setup. I really wish YTM would up the quality.

I hear you there. I'm not an audiophile myself, so I'm fine with the quality, but I understand there are people who want better.

 

[Derrek Lee]

You forgot the availability of comments on songs I love it

That's a great one, too! It's nice to be able to engage on songs I like

 

[Derrek Lee]

Spotify definitely has better sound and an infinitely better discovery. Google just plays the same things. Also back when they bundled it with YouTube it was worth the cost.
Since they have just dismantled it. It's a substantial downgrade from GPM. My advice, never become attached to anything Google and simply use 3rd party to begin with.

Yeah I mean I totally get why people love Spotify so much. I'm just not there yet, but some of the features are really neat

 

[Laura Knotek]

I don't use YouTube music because of the low quality and repetition. I've had Spotify Premium for years, and it doesn't repeat songs too much. The only reason I subscribe to YouTube Premium is to eliminate the ads in YouTube videos. Music videos don't matter to me because I stream in the car as a replacement for radio. I haven't listened to radio in years because the music isn't what I like, and there are too many ads. Spotify is great in the car.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Yeah I mean I totally get why people love Spotify so much. I'm just not there yet, but some of the features are really neat

How about Deezer? Their library is very good and everything that is labeled as HiFi is actually HiFi *cough* Tidal. Sound was great and you can upload your own tracks if they are missing from their library.

Only reason I left is while family HiFi significantly brings the price down, everybody we had on it wanted to go to something else.

I'm not pooping on your wanting to go back, just giving my contrasting experience of why I left the other way around and will likely never go back.

 

[The5pider]

I really liked Google Play Music back in the day, especially the radio function that was a gateway/rabbit-hole into music and bands that I'd never heard before. I'd argue that it was my most valued subscription service of any medium. Then YouTube was bought by Google and they obviously wanted to only run one service and not compete effectively with themselves.
The problem, was they arbitrarily went with YouTube music and abandoned many of the great features that made GPM good in the first place. Playlists didn't migrate properly, the user interface was trying to be all things to all people and effectively was a rehash of the normal YouTube video interface, it all just felt forced and corporate.
Eventually, after a year of YTM, I gave up, found a 3rd party way to migrate my many, many playlists and album lists from YTM and moved to Spotify. Since then, I'll admit, if GPM came back, I'd probably not go back as the integration of Spotify as a native app in my cars infotainment system and with the whole-house Sonos setup I have would make it a downgrade in terms of lifestyle.

TLDR; long-term Google Play Music user, migrated when forced to YouTube music, didn't like it, Spotify is more user friendly IMHO. Plus, if your main use case is background/party music who really cares about purest HiFi anyway

 

[Myke C]

I've been here since the GPM days, which the main appeal of for me was that I could upload my own music files to their servers. Between my digital collection and my physical CD collection which I had ripped, I've got quite a large collection, some of which cannot be found on any streaming service still to this day.

YTM imo, isn't as good as GPM and I'll die on that hill. But at least it still gives me access to all my uploaded music, which is the main reason I can't go to another service. The other big reason reason I stick with YTM, is I'm a big fan of DJ mixes and live shows. The amount of these to that I can access because of the link to YT just can't be matched on any other platform.

 

[Mooncatt]

Meanwhile, I'm over here chilling on Pandora. XD

 

[zielwolf7]

Two glaring downsides of YouTube Music that frustrate me are the low quality streaming and lack of "direct play" integrations with speaker and amplifier systems. It's actually hard to listen to YTM if you have high quality headphones or speakers. The lack of detail and fidelity is all you pay attention to. Also, my AVR has high quality direct play integrations for Spotify and Tidal. Nothing for YouTube Music. It's hard to justify paying for two services when you want ad-free YouTube, but it's necessary if you have even a mediocre audio setup. I really wish YTM would up the quality.

YTM's best quality stream is 256 kbps AAC. This is hi-fi transparent. All the fuss about lossless sounding better & people claiming to be able to hear the difference is mostly just hot air. I bet if you set yourself an honest blind listening test you'd fail it. People forget the lossless standard of 16 bit 1411 kbps was based on a "just in case" scenario to cover the absolute limits of perfect human hearing that only a newborn is capable of. Most of the "content" in a lossless file is empty space. I did a subtractive comparison of 256 AAC with lossless with some popular rock tunes and there was simply barely anything there. Most of the discarded content was just empty space encoded into the stream to meet its parameters. If you're streaming lossless, you're just wasting bandwidth mostly.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

YTM's best quality stream is 256 kbps AAC. This is hi-fi transparent. All the fuss about lossless sounding better & people claiming to be able to hear the difference is mostly just hot air. I bet if you set yourself an honest blind listening test you'd fail it. People forget the lossless standard of 16 bit 1411 kbps was based on a "just in case" scenario to cover the absolute limits of perfect human hearing that only a newborn is capable of. Most of the "content" in a lossless file is empty space. I did a subtractive comparison of 256 AAC with lossless with some popular rock tunes and there was simply barely anything there. Most of the discarded content was just empty space encoded into the stream to meet its parameters. If you're streaming lossless, you're just wasting bandwidth mostly.

Then you have potato headphones if you can't hear the difference between a AAC encoded track (basically high bitrste mp3) and FLAC/lossless track. Are you a Google employee shilling YTM since you joined this forum just to post that?

256kbps AAC and is hardly Hi-Fi. It's barely comparable to a 320kbps mp3. The audio often pulls tracks from random YouTube videos, so 256 isn't even guaranteed guaranteed.

 

[Plex-User]

Having made the switch from YouTube music to Plex, I'm never going back and I have ZERO regrets. Spotify is so much worse than youtube music, but both desire to take music, and our control of it, out of our pockets to be hidden away and eventually slapped behind a paywall. Now that all my favorite songs and, everything else I've ever listened to, are in Plex, I know I own my music and can listen to what I want when I want. Plex even has synced lyrics like YouTube music does, except I can get lyrics for ANY song, not just the ones Google likes or scraped lyrics for.

This sort of stuff reminds me of making the move away from iTunes when it became apple music. I had originally liked iTunes, it let me import all my CDs and stuff and sorted things nicely... Then they tried to paywall my own music from me, then they made it impossible to download, then they deleted all unofficial music and forced us to download a U2 album. Google used to allow custom music as well, but since merged those onto drive or wherever, where the new youtube music music cannot see them.

Spotify is just Facebook levels of evil, can't pick your songs, ads every so often, not even a full music selection and so much spam music and bs algorithmic marketing. I still use youtube music to find a new song every so often, and Shazam.

Long rant short; Get Plex(or jellyfin but it was too slow for me) and get happy, leave the streaming wars behind.