Since it’s the only service that lets you upload your own music (or other audio) to their servers and buy youtube views, Google Play Music has gained my long-time patronage. The platform allowed for the upload of 50,000 tracks.
Why is this crucial? Perhaps you have music that hasn’t been made available commercially? either your friend’s song or an unofficial mix. Or songs that haven’t been released for streaming (Want to listen to The KLF on Spotify? Good fortune. Or you can listen to audio that isn’t even music, like audiobooks you’ve purchased elsewhere.
In any case, YouTube Music is evolving from Google Play Music and has both advantages and disadvantages.
Pros
- They’ve increased their 100,000 track music storage since switching from GPM to YTM! My main motivation for using YouTube Music is for this.
- Integration into larger YouTube apps is there and functional, if not particularly outstanding. (Similar to using the YouTube TV app to access TV shows and movies you’ve purchased from the Google Play store.)
- Good compatibility with Google Assistant. Occasionally, too well.
Where appropriate, you can purchase song videos if you so choose. Despite this, the audio in the videos is frequently subpar compared to the studio audio quality.
Cons
- It’s difficult to browse your own songs. This is terrible. You cannot navigate your library quickly on the browser; instead, you must wait for an infinite screen to load. Because it takes so long, if you have a large collection of albums in your library (as I have), you rarely move past the “B”s.
- Not as good a device connection as Spotify. It is acceptable to send audio from your phone to your speakers, however Spotify offers better hardware integration than Google.
- It’s hard to call the YouTube Music Android TV app an app at all. It was released last month, but all it does is provide a shortcut to the Music tab of the standard YouTube video program. I asked a question about it on the YouTube Music sub-reddit since I couldn’t believe such basic functionality wasn’t present. It was removed because it was offensive!