YouTube Music vs. Spotify vs. Apple Music: 5 Reasons to Make the Switch

More people listen to music now than ever in history. What was once a hobby that required you to find and buy your favorite artists’ CDs is now as easy as opening an app on your phone. There are plenty of apps for this. Spotify is the most popular, whereas Apple Music offers a more premium alternative. Each app has a fairly large music library and some exclusive perks, with no single app being objectively better than all others.

However, these small differences can be make-or-break factors for different users. For many, there are plenty of reasons you should switch to YouTube Music, as the app has certain features that Spotify and Apple Music do not. While the app still doesn’t support lossless audio like Apple Music, YouTube Music’s advantages include a larger catalog, more features available for free, better paid plans, and certain other benefits unique to YouTube Music.

1. Better Free Version Experience

Everything comes with a recurring subscription nowadays. You rarely own a copy of any app, and even free ones have premium versions. Spotify and YouTube Music are both free but lock important features behind their premium tiers, whereas Apple Music only has a paid version.

Not everyone wants to spend extra money each month just to listen to music, which is why it’s important to consider which music streaming app has the best free version. Spotify has long been known to be notoriously cruel to its free users. The app used to only allow six skips per hour, and while that restriction has somewhat been relaxed through limited on-demand listening time, other reasons to ditch Spotify still exist. You can’t rewind, move forward, or seek a timestamp inside a song, for example. You can’t even listen exclusively to songs in your playlists, as Spotify automatically adds recommended songs into your shuffle.

YouTube Music users don’t face a lot of these restrictions. You can rewind and seek in songs and videos alike just like you can in normal YouTube, and there’s no limit on skips. You also don’t get songs added to your playlist, and you can listen to songs in your playlist in order—unlike on Spotify, where you’re forced into Smart Shuffle. Additionally, while both apps have ads, YouTube Music’s ads are skippable and much shorter. One important thing to consider is that the free version of YouTube Music doesn’t let you listen to songs in the background or with the phone screen turned off, unlike Spotify.

2. More Value on Premium Plans

YouTube Music has a decently good free plan—minus the lack of background play. If you want access to this feature or are generally willing to spend a few bucks every month for a better experience, it’s important to compare the different features that Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music provide for their premium versions.

While the single dollar difference might not seem like much each month, it can add up over time. Apple Music is even cheaper than YouTube Music, but only if you’re talking about music streaming. One of the many things people don’t know about YouTube Premium is that it includes YouTube Music Premium as well. As such, you can buy YouTube Premium for $15.99 for a solo user or $8.99 for students, and you get no ads on your YouTube videos on top of the ad-free music streaming and tons of other features that you get with YouTube Music’s paid tier.

3. Much Larger Collection of Things to Listen To

Whether it’s Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music, each app features a vast collection of things you can choose to listen to. This includes your favorite songs, all the latest releases, old-school albums, and even podcasts. However, if you truly want the biggest collection of songs or regularly listen to niche content, YouTube Music is vastly superior to any alternative out there.

This is because YouTube Music, like YouTube itself, has user-submitted content, which gives it more freedom on what it can present to its users. This includes content from labels that aren’t willing or are simply unable to license their music to streaming platforms, indie video game songs that the creator never uploaded to a streaming site, remixes of existing titles, and much more.

Music streaming aside, the app’s podcast catalog is unparalleled as well. You can only play content that creators specifically upload to Apple Music and Spotify on either app, whereas YouTube Music’s catalog features YouTube’s entire 20-plus years of content for you to listen to in the background.

4. Better Support for Your Favorite Artists

Supporting your favorite artists was straightforward in the past. You buy their albums and CDs, get fan merchandise, and go to their concerts. This is much more complex when streaming platforms come into play. Each platform pays the artist in exchange for profiting off of people using their platform to listen to the artist, but the rates and terms of payment differ.

Spotify, for example, has a complex grouped-royalty structure where artists get an average of $0.004 per stream. This might not seem like much, but ends up being quite a lot with millions of streams. YouTube Music pays a much higher average of $0.007 per stream, almost double what Spotify does. Apple Music claims to pay even higher, with the company stating in 2021 that the average is $0.01 per stream. However, newer estimates from Velveteen put the number between $0.006 and the claimed $0.01.

5. Free Cloud Storage for Your Own Music

Music streaming apps and cloud storage typically don’t go hand in hand; you cannot use Spotify servers to store your local music. However, YouTube Music does allow this, as you can upload your local audio files effortlessly to YouTube Music using your browser.

If you have copies of songs that aren’t available online, you can upload them to a private cloud and listen to them from any of your devices. This serves both as a way to increase your collection of songs and also as a secondary backup, as you can upload your own audio files. Additionally, YouTube Music doesn’t show you ads when you’re listening to music you’ve uploaded yourself, and, unlike when you’re usually listening to songs on its free version, you can play them in the background and with the screen turned off.

To upload files on YouTube Music:

1. Open YouTube Music in a browser.

2. Click on your profile icon.

3. Select Upload Music from the drop-down.

4. Drag and drop or choose any files you want to upload.

5. Access them from any device using the same Google account.

You can upload up to 100,000 personal songs this way, which means you won’t be running into an upload limit anytime soon—or at all.

Comparison:

• Spotify: Allows local file uploads but they aren’t saved on the cloud. You can only listen to them on the device you’ve uploaded them from.

• Apple Music: Offers the same functionality as YouTube Music but requires an active subscription.

• YouTube Music: Free cloud storage for up to 100,000 songs, accessible across all devices.

Summary

Conclusion

YouTube Music offers a compelling alternative to Spotify and Apple Music, especially for users who value a larger catalog, better free version features, and the ability to upload their own music to the cloud. While it lacks lossless audio and background play on the free tier, its integration with YouTube Premium, higher artist payouts, and extensive library make it a strong contender. For those who want the best value for money and access to niche content, YouTube Music is worth the switch.