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 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 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 one of these companies is for it 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 lawn mowers and chainsaws. their motorcycle brand is a separate corporate object now and 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 true non-slop streaming app i tried. i especially liked their discovery thing 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, but the best version of it involved Plexamp, and the most interesting part of Plexamp is its Sonic Analysis, which actually listens to the audio in your personal library and uses what it hears to build mixes. Plexamp used to connect directly to Tidal, meaning your own files and a streaming catalog could live inside one obsessive, turbo-autistic listening system, but the partnership ended.

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. now i mostly log in to browse the tracks i saved in a different version of my life. SoundCloud Go+ gives you officially published music alongside all the strange, unofficial and scene-specific material SoundCloud is known for. very cool. closer to the correct idea.

anyway, 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. obviously it has all the miscellaneous features every streaming app is expected to have. the difference is that it almost accidentally understands that music is much larger than the official catalog.

on another service, the path ends at the officially released song. maybe a piano-cover artist somehow went through distribution and uploaded it everywhere, but probably not. otherwise i would have gone back to Instagram and listened to the same short section on a loop, or searched regular YouTube and pretended keeping the video open was the same thing. on YouTube Music, the cover was simply music, just another track. it sat beside the official recording 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 genuine problem for me. i'd have OG Whole Lotta Red Carti leaks, demos, and random tracks pasted into Apple Notes. some would be local files and some would be links at risk of being nuked off the internet, while all the official releases lived on Apple Music. listening to the music i actually cared about meant switching between Apple Music and the Notes app, which is just not a music application and should never have been asked to carry this responsibility. i had built a small administrative system just to remember where each sound lived.

YouTube Music puts all of it in one place. if i like a music video on YouTube, it can show up in my Liked Music playlist on YouTube Music. if somebody uploads a demo, leak, live performance, fan edit, piano cover, or remix, i can encounter it in the same app as the album version, all assisted by the algorithm. YouTube became one of the centers of music on the internet a long time ago. YouTube Music has access to more of the consequences of that than any other streaming service.

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 what parts it uses, but it certainly feels 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.

suddenly familiar songs are close to ten minutes long—chopped, mixed, extended, and looped by people who are obsessed with specific tracks—and 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—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 cuz that's way too much effort.

the catalog is only half 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 i'm actively looking for new music, i can come away with a handful of new-to-me artists and tracks. in one fucking day. i'm pretty sure that's incredible. Apple Music and Spotify never came close for me 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 leaning on watch history, listening behavior, titles, playlists, scenes, and whatever else YouTube knows. i don't know. other companies may have equally sophisticated models, but they don't have whatever remains of my seventeen years of YouTube history.

the strange part is that Google doesn't seem able or willing to advertise the messiest part of its platform's advantage. “we have all the music that was never properly licensed, distributed, cleared, finished, plus a shit ton of fan edits” is not a sentence the legal department is going to put on a billboard. if somebody edits a song, uploads it, and gets millions of views, the rights and payments can become a mess. who owns what part? who gets paid? does Content ID monetize it or block it in some countries, or is it surviving because nobody has noticed it yet? i have no idea, and i doubt there's one good answer.

Google still does plenty of dumb shit. there's this new Beyond the Beat AI-commentary experiment i somehow opted into, which now pops up after what feels like every other track. the only control it puts in front of me while i'm listening is a snooze button for one hour or one day, so these AI-generated commentators keep returning to tell me the same facts whenever i'm listening to the same artist. did you know Lucki's original rap name was Lucki Eck$, a reference to the second syllable of the prescription medication Xanax?

but even with that, i think once someone has fully moved over to YouTube Music, the idea of using another service becomes a nonstarter.

anyways. YouTube Music is the only service that treats all of that as music. not many people seem to care. Google itself might be incapable of explaining it, or maybe it just doesn't feel safe explaining it, but i get it, and i probably won't ever stop yapping about it whenever the topic of music streaming comes up.