I have a love-hate relationship with YouTube Music Premium. On the one hand, it comes bundled with my YouTube Premium subscription to eliminate ads. On the other hand, it isn’t the best app for playing music or even podcasts.
I’ve documented ways to replace YouTube Music with alternative apps. For music, I have BitChord. As for podcasts, AntennaPod has been my go-to app. Both are ad-free and open source, and you don’t need to sign up.
However, I still need YouTube Music in my life. It works better with my home entertainment system and navigation apps while driving. As much as I’d like to uninstall it, I can’t replace its tight integration with my workflow.
I recently found another reason to give up on YouTube Music. It’s been a major culprit in draining my Android phone’s battery. It got so bad that it topped my daily battery usage, even though it had less screen time and background usage than my other apps.
It took me a while to figure out what was up. With the help of Gemini Live, I found out that the issue was tied to a Premium feature. The fix was surprisingly easy to apply.
Background downloads were the problem
It wasn’t obvious at first
The main clue was that the background battery usage was unusually high. This happened on days when I didn’t play music or podcasts while the screen was off.
I went through the settings and experimented with a few. I lowered the audio quality and disabled autoplay, but neither solved most of the battery drain.
After consulting with Gemini Live, I realized the excessive drain came from a YouTube Music Premium-exclusive feature called Smart Downloads.
I initially had this feature turned off, but after transferring from one phone to another, the setting reset back to being on. It took only a few steps to deactivate it again:
- Open the YouTube Music app.
- Tap your profile in the upper-right corner.
- Enter Settings.
- Go to Downloads & storage.
- Turn off Smart downloads.
While you’re there, turn off Recently played songs to stop YouTube Music from automatically downloading recent songs. If the app doesn’t delete existing downloads automatically, tap Clear downloads at the bottom towipe your list.
Smart Downloads uses your playback history, liked songs, and most-visited playlists and albums to decide which songs to automatically download to your app. It runs in the background without user interaction, which explains the unexpected battery drain.
Similarly, the Recently Played Songs option in the same menu downloads tracks based on your recent history. It doesn’t use the same predictive algorithm as Smart Downloads, but it still saps battery in the background.
More ways to prevent excessive battery drain
There’s more than one way to tame the beast
If you keep experiencing unexpected battery drain on YouTube Music, try these other solutions.
One trick is to limit what YouTube Music plays. Go to Settings > Data Saving and turn on Don’t play music videos and Don’t play podcast videos.
Prioritizing audio-only playback and preventing YouTube Music from preloading videos in the background alleviates some battery drain. I never watch videos on YouTube Music; I reserve that experience for the YouTube app.
Since I use YouTube Music as a streaming app, I turn off its push notifications. This can be done via Settings > Notifications. Turn off the notifications you don’t need. In my case, I turned everything off.
In general, push notifications are a strong battery sapper on Android. In this case, YouTube Music would constantly refresh updates in the background and decide which ones to push to my display if I left them on.
My last resort would be to restrict YouTube Music’s background usage. You can access this in Android Settings > Apps > YouTube Music > App battery usage. From here, keep Allow background usage on, but select Optimized in the submenu.
Even on Optimized, YouTube Music will continue playing in the background as long as there’s an active song or podcast. Leaving YouTube Music at Unrestricted could cause more battery issues.
As a general rule of thumb, reserve Unrestricted background usage for priority apps, such as messaging and fitness-tracking apps.
No more unknown battery drain
It’s ironic that I needed Google’s Gemini AI to help me resolve an issue with another Google app. Luckily, the fix was quick and didn’t negatively impact my YouTube Music experience.
If you upgrade from the free tier to Premium, turn off Smart Downloads. It’s the one paid feature that badly affects battery life.