Youtube Music

FOR Clean interface; lots of rare music; extensive content AGAINST Average sound quality; poor discovery feature

Music streaming is all about the numbers. If your service doesn’t have tens of millions of tracks and can’t attract millions of paying subscribers, then something’s wrong. Google is no stranger to big numbers – it acquired Youtube for $1.65bn back in 2006 – but for all its mind-boggling wealth, Google has proved dismally ineffective at crashing the world of music streaming.

Youtube is currently the world’s most popular music streaming service – despite that not being its raison d’être – so Google is attempting to harness its ubiquity by formalising a music streaming service that’s easy to use and offers all the features of the market leaders. The result is Youtube Music.

Happy families

There are some likeable aspects to it, including the free tier supported by ads. For £10 per month, you get Youtube Music Premium, which avoids the ads and allows downloads for offline listening, but up your spend to £12 and Youtube Premium allows ad-free access to Youtube Music and Youtube, with download functionality. Youtube Music Premium Family costs £15 per month, adding up to six family members.

The Youtube Music app (there’s no desktop equivalent) is dark, but cleanly laid out, with nice legible fonts and three main controls. ‘Library’ is where the lists of songs, albums or artists you’ve liked, and playlists you’ve created, reside. ‘Hotlist’ is effectively a ‘trending’ page, currently featuring all music videos, though there are plans to include pure audio too. Of course, Youtube Music is not alone in including music videos, but it does have pretty much all of them.

‘Home’ is divided into tiers or ‘shelves’, where curated playlists (‘New Electronics’, ‘Easy Rolling Pop-rock Classics’) vie for your attention with ‘Recommended Music Videos’, based on artists you liked when you set up your account. It also includes ‘Your mixtape’, Youtube Music’s sole discovery feature. Being owned by the Emperor of Algorithms, you’d expect Youtube Music’s discovery feature to start making a few judicious recommendations in short order. But despite a week of listening to music and mashing the ‘like’ icon on our favourite artists, our ‘Your mixtape’ selection remains predictable – the vast majority turn out to be music we already know by artists we already like.

It’s possible to expand the scope of your ‘discoveries’ by enabling locationand activity-based recommendations, so Youtube Music tailors its choices to suit your activity or the time of day. Whether you’re happy to share this information with Google is another matter.

In terms of catalogue, Youtube Music puts meaningful distance between it and other rival music streaming services. Thanks to the efforts of millions of Youtubers, there are a huge number of uploaded music files on Youtube Music that simply aren’t available on any other platform. But when it comes to sound quality, Youtube fails to stand out. It’s not a catastrophe (apart from some atrocious user-uploaded files), but it’s really only just about satisfactory.

There is just one audio standard, and it’s Youtube’s default 128kbps – even if you’re paying monthly for the service. Never mind Tidal Masters or Qobuz Hi-fi (those cost £20 per month, after all), Spotify is prepared to pony up 320kbps for a tenner a month. Even Apple Music does better than 128kbps, and Apple has never been hung up on high bitrates.

As a consequence, any music we play receives the same treatment. Dynamic range is minimised, bass tends to be lightweight and treble sounds are rounded off. The overall impression is one of compression – songs that should breathe deeply and take flight sound like they’re being smothered by a pillow.

We’re impressed by Youtube Music’s ability to turn up long-lost musical gems, and for that reason alone it’s worthy of consideration. But if you’re as concerned about music quality as you are about finding it, Youtube Music is frustrating.