In recent years, I have happily subscribed to YouTube Music through YouTube Premium. Not only does this save me from ads on either platform, but Google has slowly turned YouTube Music into a pretty decent streaming service. There’s a lot to like about it.
However, I haven’t used Spotify since we were thinking about the Covid-19 pandemic, and even then I wasn’t subscribed to it. So I thought it might be a good idea to review the app and take advantage of Spotify Premium to see what I missed.
Most of my friends and family use Spotify, and it seems much more ubiquitous than other music streaming apps when it comes to third-party integration. It’s pretty hard to escape Spotify, and using YouTube Music I often feel a little left out when new features are released or when someone shares links to songs that I can’t listen to because I don’t I’m not a subscriber.
After using Spotify exclusively for the past month, here are the things I like about the app, the things I still miss about YouTube Music, and whether or not I see myself making the change permanent.
The features that made me change
The decision to change did not come to me overnight. This is something I first considered during a New Year’s Eve trip in 2023, while I was in Hawaii with my friends. Someone is usually playing music for us to enjoy while we relax, play games, or walk back and forth. Everyone had Spotify, which I didn’t think much about before the trip, but there was one feature in particular that made me realize how much I was missing.
Spotify Jam is an incredibly useful feature launching in fall 2023. It allows a person to create a “Jam,” which is essentially a queue of songs that they can invite others to join. Anyone in the Jam can add songs and manage the order of the songs, making it a collaborative DJing effort.
I love this feature because it allows everyone to shuffle the music queue and show each other’s music preferences. I have a pretty eclectic taste in music, and while my friends love it when I DJ, I know my tastes don’t always agree with everyone in the room, and there are certain genres or songs that I might not be too familiar with. others may like it.
For this reason, I made it a point to upgrade to Spotify Premium before our New Year’s Eve 2024 trip so that I could jam myself since I was the main DJ this time around with my new Sony ULT Field 1. Spotify Jam I also made it so that I didn’t have to create a playlist beforehand, which saved me a lot of time as we were simply creating a queue in real time. This feature alone was worth subscribing to Premium, and if you’re late to the party and haven’t tried this feature yet, I recommend it the next time you and your friends get together .
Another feature I love is a little less flashy but almost as important to me. Spotify has a Smart Shuffle feature that will insert songs you think you’ll like when you shuffle a playlist you’ve created.
I sometimes struggle to discover new music, as I often feel comfortable with what I know and love. I have several playlists that I cycle through depending on my mood, so I know almost every song very well. I often add a song every now and then, but my playlists tend to stay pretty stagnant. This is why I love the Smart Shuffle feature so much; it keeps me in familiar territory while giving me something new to listen to that fits with the other songs on my playlist; that way it doesn’t stick out too much and ruin the mood.
Spotify’s DJ AI was also a feature that really intrigued me, as it’s apparently another way to discover tracks based on the music you love. The AI-generated DJ cues up every few songs to configure your listening experience, changing the mood from time to time with songs you know or might like. It’s a unique feature that I find quite musical, because it almost feels like you’re listening to the radio, something I don’t do much these days.
That said, the execution is far from perfect. The DJ often switches to genres or artists that don’t interest me, and I have the impression that he will intervene a little too often to change the mood of the songs. Sometimes I just want to stay in the same mood or feeling for a while, and the DJ changes things at will, which sometimes seems quite jarring.
This is definitely a nice feature, which I think Spotify should tweak a bit. However, this highlights one of my biggest problems with switching to Spotify, the one that makes me miss YouTube Music.
What I miss in YouTube Music
One of the best things about YouTube Music is that the app seemed to know me before I even started using it. When I first subscribed to YouTube Premium during the pandemic, I was surprised at how well the app was able to guess my tastes by recommending songs that I ended up liking. This is because YouTube Music is linked to the main YouTube app and my music searches over the years would therefore influence YouTube Music’s knowledge of me.
This is something I struggle with when it comes to Spotify. The app’s music recommendations just seem subpar compared to my experience with YouTube Music, and I find myself skipping songs more often than not. That’s not to say everything is bad, and the songs that appear in Smart Shuffle are often great. But whether it’s through a music radio or through the DJ AI, Spotify doesn’t really seem to understand me.
Of course, I recognize that this is more of a growing pain situation and the app will have to take some time to get used to my tastes. My previous experiences with Spotify were pretty limited, so there’s not much I can do, which is evident every time I compare my Spotify Wrapped and YouTube Music Recap each year. I can’t be too hard on the app for not fully understanding my tastes, but I find it’s something that often keeps me wanting to come back to YouTube Music.
Another thing I miss about Spotify is the music selection, but not as much as you might think. I’m a big fan of remixes and often prefer them to the original mix. Spotify has a huge selection of music and remixes, but I quickly realized that it was still quite limited compared to YouTube Music.
The problem with YouTube Music is that its connection to YouTube makes it a much more powerful music streaming platform, in my opinion. I find some of the coolest remixes completely out of the blue, and even when a particular song or mix isn’t available as a piece of music, I still have instant access to the song via a YouTube video without ever having to leave the app. And as a bonus, I can watch full-length music videos if I want, which comes in handy when I’m on the treadmill and need visual stimulation.
I’m already pretty disappointed that I can’t find many of my favorite mixes on Spotify, but the lack of music videos right now is also pretty disappointing. Spotify may be an audio-focused music streaming service, but music videos are a pretty fundamental part of the music listening experience.
Will I stay or will I leave?
After using Spotify for a few months, I understand why it’s such a popular platform. The app experience feels much more mature, for lack of a better word, and Spotify has a lot to offer despite the long wait for its long-awaited Hi-Fi tier.
Meanwhile, Google is continually tweaking YouTube Music’s UI on what seems like a daily basis. It feels like Google is slowly trying to turn YouTube Music into a Spotify clone, which isn’t a bad thing, but it speaks volumes about the quality of the app experience.
That said, while Spotify is one of our favorites here on Android Central, with some genuinely fun and useful features, the main thing holding me back is the real thing. music experience. Spotify just doesn’t know me as well as YouTube Music does, and I’m not sure I want to put much more effort into teaching Spotify about my likes and dislikes. After all, I’m here to listen to the music I want to hear, and right now, YouTube Music knows exactly what that is.
For now, I’ll continue using Spotify to see how things improve, but there’s a good chance I’ll return to YouTube Music for my music needs.
