YouTube Music Is the Only True Music Streaming Service

Alright, so I've had a subscription to almost every music streaming service that exists. The first one I paid for was Apple Music, a little over a decade ago. I remember being excited to try it because I didn't think Apple would publish it on the Google Play Store. It felt very off-brand for them. But they did, it worked, it streamed music, and it became my main way of listening for another five years or so.

I don't have any memories of it coordinating any sort of intimacy between me and a track.

Apple Music seemed to want me to listen to albums, mostly albums I had already saved. Maybe I checked out some of their curated playlists, or whatever they call them. I don't think I ever did, though, probably because my nervous system has always been aware of payola. When I picture the app now, all I see is a page of album covers I'd liked. That's it. No Mix button that I can remember, no real sense of discovery. Simple and uninspiring. I'm pretty sure I did more for Apple Music than Apple Music ever did for me.

They let artists customize their profile pages now, which I've decided to call the artist shrine. Apple will probably sell you a pack of scented candles soon, so you can light them in a dark room and stare at Dua Lipa wearing a red bathing suit, her eyes locked onto yours while she's engaged in what looks like a lot of fun oceanic activity. Super wet, a bunch of legs everywhere. I'd be into it myself. It's just the ocean that makes me anxious. I never learned how to swim, and honestly, I don't think human beings belong in there. I do enjoy the beach, though. I recently went to Gray Whale Cove State Beach and watched the sunset as I bounced around to music. I also got to pet a small black dog. Much fun.

Then there was Spotify. I spent maybe a year or two there. It was nice to use a service that cared about individual songs, especially the ones I specifically liked. They were even kind enough to index them. Maybe Apple Music makes that easier now, but it didn't feel that way when I used it. Fuck 'em.

Spotify's discovery algorithm, I think, was okay. It introduced me to Hollow by Cochise once while I was driving to the lake to walk around and smoke a lean and petite-sized joint. But the best thing Spotify ever did was make me want to leave the app immediately after pressing play. Maybe that's good design. Maybe it's genius. The green is ugly, the interface is forgettable, and even though I don't think UI matters that much once the music is playing, apparently I do have limits.

All I really want from these companies is for them to let me see my likes and then put all that precious data to work. I want their AI model to know how many times I listened to a song, which exact part keeps making me come back, what my heart rate was while listening to it, and how my body responded. They can connect their model to my future Neuralink implant. They can monitor and permanently log every piece of biological data they can extract from me. They can grill me with docs. They can store it in any data center of their choice. Just do something useful with it.

Maybe Spotify already does some of that. I'd still rather not see that dirty green icon on my home screen ever again. This is difficult for me to say because I worked for a Swedish organization for years. I sold a ton of furniture for them, and we had a good relationship. I'm also a big fan of Husqvarna, the outdoor power tool people. They make lawnmowers and chainsaws. Their motorcycle brand is a separate corporate entity now and is apparently controlled by an Indian company, which I only learned because I stopped writing this paragraph to look it up. I have no issues with Sweden as a nation.

Then we get into the less slop-infested options.

Deezer was a pleasure to use. Functional but still pleasing to look at. It felt good to open, like the people who made it cared about me as a song enjoyer and also cared about their craft. Maybe it was the only truly non-slop streaming app I tried. I especially liked their discovery feature, which they call Deezer Flow. It feels esoteric, so I won't talk too much about it. Using Deezer felt like being invited into somebody's home and having them show me around. I remember it being an intimate experience, although I was severely isolated at the time. I still am, but maybe I'm no longer dissociated enough to form an emotional relationship with a music streaming app. Apparently, Deezer now lets you share a song with someone and have it open on whatever platform they use. How considerate. True artisans.

Tidal was good. It's for people who think they're enjoying music in much better quality, which they might be. I think I've just acquired hearing damage over the years from concerts and blasting my brain with sperm-murdering Bluetooth waves, so there's no use for me. Plus, I can't afford to spend a trillion dollars on Dutch & Dutch and Devialet slop. I did used to own a nice pair of V-MODAs, but my sister threw them away because of "clutter." Isn't that so fucking odd? I was amazed by this, honestly. Kind of based.

Tidal also claims they pay artists more than other streaming services, which just isn't worth looking into. I think the people who truly care about paying the artists are on Bandcamp, but personally, I'm obligated to buy two cans of Yerba Madre a day. It's a shame they had to change their name, but I do fucking love the new Mango Fuego flavor.

Anyway, the most intriguing part of Tidal wasn't really Tidal. It was Plexamp, a self-hosted service you get to through Plex Media Server, and the most interesting part of Plexamp is its Sonic Analysis, which actually listens to the audio in your local library and uses what it hears to build mixes. Plexamp used to have an option to put Tidal inside it, so your local library and an official streaming catalog could coexist in one highly customizable, turbo-autistic listening system. But Plex fumbled the partnership, or maybe Tidal got sold off. I don't really care.

I have a lot of love for SoundCloud, too. It's where I spent hours skateboarding after school, absorbing a constant stream of weird sounds. Over the years, I've spent less and less time there. These days, I only log in to look through the tracks I had saved from a different version of my life. Speaking of which, how does an artist with a track like this just completely disappear from the internet? Not even an Instagram, which is one of my favorite creative media platforms alongside YouTube and 𝕏, formerly known as Twitter. The paid tier of SoundCloud gives you access to officially published music alongside all the sauce that lives on SoundCloud. Very cool. Much closer to the correct idea.

Now, let's finally get into YouTube Music.

I was watching Instagram Reels recently and saw somebody playing a piano cover of Homecoming by Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West. It made me feel things I hadn't felt in a long, long time, so I went to listen to the track on YouTube Music. The search results had the official track, but also another piano cover by Gabe Cataldi, which I gravitated toward. It had the same homemade texture as the Instagram Reel, and I ended up listening to it on repeat for, let's say, at least 30 minutes. Then I went out to shoot photos that night, all fueled by Homecoming.

It's a streaming service that not many people seem to give a shit about. It has all the normal streaming app features, obviously. The difference is that it almost accidentally understands that music is so much more than whatever is officially published.

On another service, I would have listened to the original song, maybe run through Graduation a bit, and then gotten stuck. Either keeping Instagram open to that one Reel, or sitting at my desk on regular YouTube, pretending that keeping a video open was the same thing as listening to a real track. On YouTube Music, the piano cover was music. Just another track. It sat next to the official version and everything else I listen to, not as some sort of lower-class ritual I had to leave the app for.

This used to be a real problem for me. In the days when I'd face at least a couple of backwoods a day and needed my OG Whole Lotta Red Carti leaks handy, I'd have them pasted in Apple Notes. Some would be real files and some would be links at risk of being nuked off the internet, while all the official tracks lived on Apple Music. So I had to switch between Apple Music, SoundCloud, and the Notes app. But now YouTube Music acts as a container for all of that. If I like a YouTube Music video at my desk, it just shows up in my Liked Music playlist on my phone. If somebody uploads a demo, leak, live performance, fan edit, piano cover, or remix, it's all brought into the same app as the "official" songs, all assisted by their algorithm.

YouTube itself became the center of music on the internet a long time ago via music videos, so naturally YouTube Music now has access to the consequences of that more than any other streaming service. We wouldn't have artists like Justin Bieber if it weren't for YouTube. He was discovered because mama Bieber uploaded videos of him singing covers of R&B songs.

He was one of my ex's favorite artists; she had a cardboard cutout of him in the corner of her room. I enjoy his music, one of the few musical artists who are certified legends yet somehow massively under appreciated. Kind of like JAŸ-Z, who genuinely might be a Satan lover, but Marcy Me.

I've had the same YouTube account for something like seventeen years. Every music video I watched when I was 12, before YouTube Music was a thing, and every tiny ecosystem of remixes I fell into after that passed through the same account. I don't know exactly how much of that history Google still has or which parts it uses, but it does feel like YouTube Music has known me for a long time.

There's a specific subgenre of these unofficial tracks that I'm a massive fan of: tracks maliciously designed by random people with titles like 90210 by Travis Scott but it will change your life, Violent Crimes but it'll make you think for a while, Kanye West - Ghost Town but it will make you ascend to the fourth dimension, or White Ferrari by Frank Ocean but it will change your life.

Familiar songs that I already love get transformed into ten-minute-long experiences: chopped, mixed, extended, slowed, and reverbed by people who are obsessed with specific tracks. They're all making me shed tears on a random Thursday night. There are also fan-made "Mike Dean" versions, where somebody who is absolutely not Mike Dean takes a Kanye or Travis Scott song and reworks it with gorgeous synths. I've been listening to some of those for years at this point.

I've never really listened to Billie Eilish properly, but a while ago I couldn't stop listening to BLUE, though only one specific excerpt from it. Of course, I wasn't the only person who liked that part, and Billie Eilish - BLUE (first part only and extended) was the result of one quick search.

I'm sure Billie Eilish intended the track to be heard the way she built it, but I believe that after art is released, it no longer belongs only to the person who made it. Any rules or meaning assigned by the original artist become suggestions. I understand that might be a deeply offensive belief, but idc; as soon as a track gets absorbed through my ear, it now belongs to me. I could make a playlist full of examples, but I won't because that's way too much effort.

The catalog is like 75% of it. The little Mix button on YouTube Music is the best music-discovery feature I've ever used. I think of it as a branch button. A lot of the time, I go to my Liked Music playlist until something hits me hard, press Mix, and then keep branching through a constantly moving stream of new sounds.

On days when I'm actively looking for new music, I can come away with a handful of new-to-me artists and tracks. I'm pretty sure that's incredible, at least it is for me. Apple Music and Spotify never came close with their sterile playlists or whatever their algorithms are doing. I don't know what Google is doing under the hood of this mysterious Mix button, which they don't even seem to display properly because I literally have to swipe around a bit to find it in the mobile UI. Maybe they're analyzing the audio on a sonic level. Maybe they're leveraging my watch history and listening behavior in a way the other services can't. I don't know. They may have equally sophisticated models, but they don't have whatever remains of my seventeen years of YouTube history.

The strange thing is that Google doesn't seem able to fully communicate its platform's objective advantage. How would their marketing people say, "We have all the music that never got licensed, distributed, cleared, or finished, plus a shit ton of mixes and fan edits"?

Let's say somebody reworks 530 by Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, and it gets 6.7 🤷🏽‍♂️ million views. Is the guy who, in my opinion, fixed the track entitled to part of whatever revenue that video generates, if it generates anything at all? Is Content ID even monetizing it? Technically it shouldn't exist on YouTube, but it's been up for three years. Maybe it's hanging on because nobody's noticed, or maybe whoever "should" be paid is already getting paid. I have no idea, and I doubt there's one good answer. I'm just grateful I'm not restricted to the rushed variation that ended up on VULTURES 2.

Google still does plenty of silly shit. YouTube Music has this new "Beyond the Beat" AI commentary feature that I somehow opted myself into. It queues up after what feels like every other track, and I can only snooze it for one hour or one day at a time. It's these two AI podcasters that keep telling me that Lucki's original rap name was Lucki Eck$, a reference to the second syllable of the prescription medication Xanax.

Even with that, I think once someone has fully onboarded to YouTube Music, the idea of using another service becomes a nonstarter.

It's the only one with a truly complete catalog, and the only one that treats all of it as equal. I don't think Google is capable of, or even feels safe, explaining what YouTube Music actually is. But I get it, and I probably won't ever stop running my mouth about it whenever the topic of music streaming comes up.