I have Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal, but keep coming back to YouTube Music

Thanos has his gemstones, and I have my music subscription services.  I’ve subscribed to practically all the major streaming services. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal — they all have their own unique strengths and quirks. Of course, I’ve tried to rationalize the cost by saying that I’m keeping my options open and that different services are good for different use cases, and even moods. Spotify Jam comes in clutch when I’m throwing a party. Other days, I want Apple Music’s clean interface and easy AirPlay capabilities. Some days I’m chasing the top-tier high-fidelity streaming and catalog on Tidal. You’ve gotta have options, yeah?

But when I’m not in the mood to overthink and just want solid 80s hair metal jams to roll on their own, I end up back on YouTube Music. Not because of the app design, collaborative features, or even for the massive content library. It’s the radio. No other service’s radio stations fill that dialed-in radio DJ-shaped hole in my heart the way that YouTube Music does.

The funny thing is, I wasn’t intentionally looking to make a move to YouTube Music. The service comes as a free add-on perk with my YouTube Premium subscription and I barely, if ever, used it. However, a while back, while streaming a live concert on YouTube, the autoplay queue filled up with a consistent stream of top-tier, relevant live videos and renditions of some of my favorite, and soon-to-be-favorite tracks.

The music selection felt handpicked, though obviously it wasn’t. YouTube knows my tastes in media better than most, and it was quietly DJing in the background, helping me discover deep cuts, B-sides, and mixing it up with all the usual favorites. On a lark, I popped open YouTube Music and kicked off a radio stream based on a single song. Little did I know that I was in for a full day of music listening.

Look, Spotify’s radios are fine if you’re in the mood to stay within a familiar loop. They are particularly good if you want to stick to the chart toppers. Spotify’s algorithms are famous for playlists like Discover Weekly and Release Radar, but everyone will agree that the deeper you go into the radio function, the more you observe that it is recycling the same few artists and tracks.

Discoverability isn’t Spotify’s strong suit. On the other hand, Apple Music’s stations tend to be more editorially curated, and I’m not even talking about the excellent Apple Music Classical app. These playlists are highly polished with tracks that seamlessly lead you in a mood or genre-based journey. However, while Apple Music does have a radio function, it also has the same pitfalls as Spotify. They’re not very reactive, nor do they encourage discovering new bands. As good as the radio is, it just doesn’t feel very personal.

YouTube Music’s radio works differently, and not just in how it recommends music. To start with, there’s the library. YouTube Music doesn’t just pull from a list of official studio releases. The app taps into the sprawling catalog of YouTube itself. That means your music feed can blend tracks from studio albums with live cuts, fan uploads that never made an official release, and deep cut remixes. All of that is tied into your own watch history on YouTube, giving it an additional source of truth about your likes and dislikes.

All of that combines to give you a much richer variety of source material to pull from, and an algorithm that is willing to take a chance on presenting you with something fresh and unlike what you’ve heard already. I can, and have, started off with a single obscure track and ended up with a playlist moving seamlessly from 90s alt-rock deep cuts to a modern indie band that I’ve never heard before, while still retaining that flavor. Occasionally, YouTube Music might even throw in an acoustic version or alternate take on a popular track. There’s always a surprise, rarely a bad one.

Even before we get into the custom radio function, it’s worth mentioning that this vast library is tapped into YouTube Music’s auto-generated playlists and recommendations, which put them ahead of similar features from other streaming services.

The control that you have over a radio station even before it starts is another big reason to look into YouTube Music. The service includes a feature called the music tuner that, like Pandora, lets you blend artists and genres. But not just that, it lets you decide how adventurous you want to be with your music. There’s an option to adjust the artist variety to pull in a wider range of acts, a music discovery option that lets you switch between discovery and familiarity depending on how you’re feeling. YouTube Music even gives you the option to filter your radio experience further by choosing between popular tracks, deep cuts, new releases, and many more options. Spotify gives you nowhere close to that level of input.

Another YouTube Music exclusive that I have my eye on is the new AI-enhanced Ask Music feature. Google tends to do staggered rollouts across geographies and accounts, so I’m still waiting for it to show up, but what I’ve seen so far looks extremely promising. Positioned as an enhancement of the current radio feature, it lets you create a radio station just by describing what you want to listen to. So, for example, you can type something like “moody ambient, dark academia-inspired playlist for a rainy night when I’m reading a classic gothic horror book,” and it’ll create a playlist fine-tuned exactly for that.

If that prompt sounds oddly specific, it is. I’ve previously used ChatGPT to come up with playlist suggestions like the one I mentioned above, and having a tool like that deeply integrated into the music listening experience sounds fantastic. Most services already include mood-based playlists, but those tend to be fairly static collections that don’t adapt to specific tastes. Ask Music takes a conversational, hyper-tuned experience, which is something I’m looking forward to testing out.

There’s something to be said about YouTube Music’s integrated approach to music listening and discovery. Because it’s tied to my Google account and a decade or more of YouTube history, it’s working with years of implicit data that doesn’t just include manually tapped likes or dislikes, but also how long I listened to something, how quickly I moved back or changed to the next track. That’s data no other service has, or can have. To give you an example, I recently popped open YouTube Music and started a late-night play of atmospheric music by an Icelandic artist. No, not Bjork. Over the next hour or so, the station automatically introduced me to Scandinavian folk, minimalist piano pieces, and slow-paced electronic ambient tracks that fit the vibe, but not necessarily the genre. It encourages discovery, and by the end of my listening session ,I’d saved half a dozen tracks to my late-night playlist.

Of course, YouTube Music isn’t perfect either. The app can come across as a bit clunky, downloading music offline is way slower, and the sound quality can vary quite a bit depending on the source of the file. And if you’re coming back to the app after a while, YouTube Music too can be guilty of repeating tracks. But it’s rare, and it gives you the tools to avoid that.

I’m not canceling my other subscriptions just yet. Be it Spotify’s collaborative playlists or Jam, Apple Music’s elite-tier human-curated playlists, or Tidal’s unbeatable sound quality, every app has a cool trick that keeps me coming back for more. But YouTube Music gets a lot of playtime from me for its ability to curate the perfect playlist for what I’m feeling. It’s the only streaming service that values my love for music, keeps me listening, discovering, and curious. And that’s honestly the best thing a music streaming service can do.