I'm not a Spotify user, I'm an Apple Music user, though if there wasn't Apple Music I'd use Spotify.
The reason that I'd never use YT Music is that I never trust anything from Google: their interfaces are ugly, everything's user-unfriendly, and they have the habit of discontinuing a service at any time. Also it has the impression of not really being well-thought as a product: why name a music service after a video service? I know it's not the case but it always reminds me of those low quality music playlists where people collected low quality unofficial music videos back then in YT just for the music: simply not the right tool for the job.
A lot of people listened to music from YouTube as their primary source besides an FM radio before Spotify was available as it is now. YouTube somewhat famously signed deals with music labels back in the day. Content ID was the controversial, but necessary compromise for the music to remain on YouTube. I am pretty sure a very significant percentage of music listeners globally listen mainly from YouTube, I did it and I also saw a lot of people doing it.
It may seem stupid or counter productive, but it is easy and good enough. YT Music is a clear upgrade for those users.
I think YT Music makes more sense than many of the Google initiatives and it will continue to make sense as long as they will have deals with music labels.
I use regular YouTube (not Music) for discovering music by way of playlist mix videos sometimes (such as the retrowave/chillwave/etc mixes by soulsearchanddestroy), but if I like a playlist well enough I’ll rebuild it in my Apple Music library with a combination of tracks on AM natively or in some cases with Bandcamp purchases. Music being tied up in YouTube long term is cumbersome, even with YT Premium offline downloads as an option.
Google already shut down their first music streaming service.
Trying to get your playlists out was a complete nightmare too, some moron at Google decided on a ridiculously poor data structure. It was something utterly absurd like a zip with a CSV file per track, that generally had only that track in it.
Well, they shut down two music services. The first was Songza, which they bought. They then took everything Songza had- namely their awesome mood-based, artisanally curated playlists- and put it into Google Play Music. Then they seemingly let go of everyone who maintained the playlists and never updated them again? Those playlists on Songza were _excellent_ and the Snoop Dog collabs were just delightful.
Not sure how Google internally makes decision but I imagine it works entirely quarter by quarter trying to measure individual Impact with no overarching vision or direction.
> Youtube's best audio is format 251: Opus with a variable bitrate target of 128k. Note that 128k Opus is approximately equal in quality to 320k mp3 (as in, it's generally considered transparent)
I care a lot about audio quality and I use YT premium for music just about every day. You also get enhanced bitrate on some videos with premium.
YT Music really is odd. I pay for YT Premium and so have played with it a few times but it feels rather ill-suited for its purpose… as you say, the video streaming heritage is quite evident. Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, heck even Amazon Music last I tried it have much more music-oriented UIs.
YouTube is also actively hostile to third party devs in ways that at least Apple isn’t, somehow. Third party Apple Music clients have existed for years using official Apple-provided APIs, which YouTube isn’t going to ever allow even for paying customers.
The reason that I'd never use YT Music is that I never trust anything from Google: their interfaces are ugly, everything's user-unfriendly, and they have the habit of discontinuing a service at any time. Also it has the impression of not really being well-thought as a product: why name a music service after a video service? I know it's not the case but it always reminds me of those low quality music playlists where people collected low quality unofficial music videos back then in YT just for the music: simply not the right tool for the job.