Comparing minor features of Spotify and YouTube Music
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Since Spotify recently updated their prices across all available premium plans, I decided to test out one competitive platform: YouTube Music from Google.
While many reviews and comparisons focus on the major differences, like price, algorithms, music recommendations, playlist creations and other promoted features by those platforms (including garbage AI features), this post focuses on unnecessary comparisons between little things most people don’t care about.
Spotify has made me love a simple but yet so powerful feature called “Crossfade”. It allows users to personalize how many seconds (0-12s) between the current and the following song should be overlapped to reduce “non-playing” time because many songs lower the volume in the end, so you don’t strictly benefit listening to the potential silence.
YouTube Music doesn’t offer such functionalities and there are also many other features I wish to see in more streaming platforms that Spotify has built upon the years:
- Listening to music together with Jams
- Generating new playlists from single tracks
- Add one song to multiple playlists at the same time
While for hard-core reddit users and maybe even intermediate music enthusiasts it is probably common knowledge that the Spotify shuffle algorithm is completely broken and unfair towards lesser known artists, Spotify recently added a new “Fewer Repeats” shuffle mode, which ironically is enabled by default as if Spotify is admitting that its old algorithm is less recommendable. Whether the option between the new and the old, now so-called “Standard” shuffle adds more confusion or finally satisfies all users that have been begging for such a seemingly simple fix for multiple years by now, will yet have to be decided by each individual listener.
While it might seem for most YouTube Music listeners that the shuffle algorithm of their streaming platform “just works”, in my opinion the UX is far from perfect. The option to shuffle a playlist or album with one click is nowhere near to be seen because you either need to always listen to the first song of your playlist before being able to activate shuffle or you need to fumble around to find the hidden menu item “Shuffle play” with winter gloves. Definitely more convenient in Spotify where shuffle stats are saved between plays, respecting your preference much better.
This is clearly the only section where YouTube Music leads the way in my opinion, while sacrificing your hearing ability at the same time. Although Spotify allows to configure the maximum volume deeply nested in the settings somewhere (Settings → Playback → Volume Controls → Volume Level) with three different options: Quiet, Normal and Loud, I am really dissatisfied that Loud on 100% is equivalent to about 80% of the non-customizable YouTube Music volume. And while I get that too loud listening activities are just simply bad for your health - no debate about that -, we all know that everyone once was in their 20s where we don’t care about our hearing capabilities in later life.
I know there are a lot of people out there that have never created their own playlist as streaming services already offer great managed playlists with your music style ready to be saved to your library. Nonetheless, I am this kind of guy who wants to believe that they have control over their own playlist and when I discover a new song, I want to add it to all of my playlists where this song fits into. Spotify made some huge but in my opinion very beneficial redesigns of exactly this process. Therefore, they now offer a great overview where you can ideally manage the songs in your playlists.
In YouTube Music, songs have to added one-by-one to your playlists which is a tedious process if you have around 20 playlists that are based on moods and one song usually fits into multiple moods or lets say categories.
Both music services offer quite good options for enhancing your static playlists with similar songs if you feel like discovering new songs that would fit besides known and loved ones. Spotify once again gives you much more options however, as there is the “Smart Shuffle” mode which temporarily adds those songs to your playlist until disabled. Moreover, they have the “Go to song radio”, which generates a whole playlist based on the song you currently vibe most to. This playlist can then optionally be saved to your library of course. On YouTube Music, the radio feature is called “Start mix” which just puts similar songs into the queue, not allowing you to save the awesome mix as a playlist.
To confuse you even more, Spotify also offers a “Mix” feature on playlists that allows complete customization of the transition between songs with equalizers, fade-ins and -outs, bpm controll and some more features I do not understand as a casual listener. Although this might be very cool for transition lovers and DJs starters, I personally can not see any potential benefit for normal music lovers and would much more prefer to be able to loop over specific parts of songs instead, which would be super helpful if the hook of one song is extremly good, but you don’t like the boring rap part in between.
Yes, the order of my tracks in my playlists matter. Spotify and YouTube Music offer great ways to sort your playlist, with Spotify once again offering more flexibility by allowing sorting by title, artist, album and date added. YouTube Music really thinks that dates are everything I care about — well maybe I do.
Not so important for most people I would assume, but still relevant enough to be written about in this post of untalked features: Spotify once again allows to order your playlists, albums and artists in your library by recent listening activity, recent song additions, title and also creator. Plus they offer pins so you can always expect to hit your favourite playlist when you know the positioning by heart. This seems like a little advantage but trust me, the speed difference is incredible.
Talking about speed, YouTube Music offers the “Speed dial” which are basically pins but on your Home tab (?) It takes some time to get used to, especially since other playlists are already listed on the home page above your speed dial, which one could argue makes them more quickly accessible with your thumb. Nonetheless, sorting playlists in my library should be a must-feature. And sorry if I am just too stupid, but I still don’t understand what the difference between “Recent activity” and “Recently played” is supposed to be, especially when you consider the third option: “Recently saved”. YouTube Music should really think about their DAU (Dumbest Assumable User) or offer info boxes. Either way, removing one of those three options and adding alphabetical order would be my recommendation for improvements.
Not much to write, I really enjoy the UX and UI design of both YouTube Music and Spotify. Both offer wunderful tabs for playlists, artists, albums and more that each offer “sub-filtering” as I like to call it, e.g. “Subscriptions” or “By you”, “By Spotify” and “Downloaded”, respectively for YouTube Music and Spotify. As you can once again see, Spotify simply offers more and they feel smarter and also faster. Not sure why the YouTube Music tabs have a little .5s delay, but it ruins the flow of picking a little bit.
In general, it feels like YouTube Music offers lyrics on more songs than Spotify, but I didn’t run any fancy benchmarks. Both services are largely accurate compared to what I believe is sung. Since I have been using Spotify for much longer now, I can only remember mismatches on the former platform. However, AFAIK lyrics are provided by Musixmatch and Spotify offers somewhat okay-ish ways to report wrong lyrics. Personally, I would love to be able to also suggest the correct lyrics when submitting feedback, as how should Musixmatch know which part of the lyrics are the reasons for my reporting action.
YouTube Music probably has the advantage in this point since they use both Musixmatch and LyricFind and as I know Google probably some additional AI comparison to fill the gaps.
YouTube Music people mostly rave about the awesomeness of the YouTube algorithm and its understanding of your liking which leads to better discoverability of new songs. Admittedly, the algorithm of Google even after a short time of usage feels much more suited than what Spotify would have been able to learn from my habits for over three years now, which is incredible on the one hand but totally understanable and comprehensible on the other hand, given that Google almost exclusively makes billions of dollars every year thanks to nearly perfect advertisment match-making. What I try to say is: Google has the advantage because their business model relies on a secret, yet powerful algorithm, while Spotify’s primary selling point is simply Spotify. Correct me if I’m wrong in the comments, pls!
As a result, YouTube Music has the better algorithm and understands very well what you want to listen to at any point in time. Their recommendations are delightful and therefore, the discoverability of new songs feels like sensory overload. Spotify’s recommendations are decent, once in a while I really listen to new songs that I actually enjoy and save into at least five playlists at once thanks to the overview feature.
And now the final argument, why - as you might have noticed - I prefer Spotify over YouTube Music: The fr*cking ecosystem of Spotify. While many talk about the obvious advantage of syncing what you currently play between all your devices and having (almost*) full control of what you play on another device, which is pretty cool, I am writing about the little benefits here: The Raycast Spotify integration makes controlling music while working on my MacBook extremely fun and enjoyable. stats.fm just produces awesome daily, weekly, monthly and overall stats about my listening activity on Spotify: I know exactly, how many times I have listened to each song and if I continue to list advantages of stats.fm the post would be twice as long. Nonetheless, I have to mention the weekly creation of amazing looking images with my top artists and songs of the week.
*: The one thing I miss when controlling music from another device on Spotify is volume controll. When my headphones are connected to my phone and I work on my laptop, I want to be able to control the volume nonetheless. I understand that this is another topic when joining a jam, where only the host should be able to control the volume to avoid trolls, but within my own devices, this seems like a reasonable feature.
YouTube Music doesn’t offer any cool stats, the Raycast integration needs the YouTube Music “app” (it’s a wrapper of the webpage) downloaded which doesn’t even work when using nix-darwin. Public API endpoints would really benefit YouTube Music to allow third-party apps to visualize your music habits.
And even more important, the integrations that exists (obviously with YouTube itself) are terrible. Google doesn’t split my music and the videos I watch in any reasonable way. I mean: Why on earth would I want to see all my library playlists on my YouTube profile and have to scroll all the way down to finally be able to find the “Watch Later” video playlist ?!? If I wanna watch videos, I wanna go into the YouTube app and if I wanna listen to music, I wanna go into the YouTube Music app. It’s that simple. No need for some automatically generated YouTube Music playlist “Liked music”, which shows YouTube videos that are by pure coincidence also music videos at the same time. I understand that this separation is really hard, as the two platforms evolved as one and are now supposed to serve two different purposes. But Google charges the apps separately, so the should also provide this separation in the apps. This is the point where I think about adding a “Rage” tag to the post.
To be fair: YouTube Music offers a simple toggle under Settings → General → “Show your liked music from YouTube” which allows users to filter your “Liked music” playlist for only tracks you liked on YouTube Music. However, the other way around for whole playlists would also be very beneficial. I simply don’t want to see my music playlists on my YouTube profile, private or public, whatever.
My ratings (stars or whatever you want to imagine):
- Spotify: 9/10
- YouTube Music: 6.5/10
Distribution of points from this post (by heading):
- Spotify: 8/11 (Crossfade, Shuffle, Adding songs, Mixes, 2x Sorting, Filtering, Ecosystem)
- YouTube Music: 3/11 (Volume, Lyrics, Discoverability)
Spotify offers way more customization, flexibility and settings. YouTube Music just knows what you want to hear.
All in all, I find it pretty sad that the music industry is so broken, where artists need 1000x more listeners to achieve the same profit compared to hard copies like they were available before I was born. And since the whole industry is basically controlled by the ‘Big Three’ - Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment (SME), and Warner Music Group (WMG) - it is impossible for Spotify to be profitable in the long run, with competitions like YouTube Music which do not necessarily need to raise prices as the companies behind all other platforms have other apps that make enough money for compensation.
To be honest, all this comparison and deep write is a waste of time, let’s just go back to gramophone records. Nonetheless, share your disagreements and maybe also your positive opinions in the comments below. Happy listening and lower the volume from time to time!