YouTube Music Premium

glenimp617 · 27 Sep 2018 at 08:07

HI Everyone,

Just wondering what's everyones thought on the YT Music premium service. My contract is coming up to an end now so I need to decide if I'm keeping spotify, or switching over to something else.

IIRC

Single

£9.99 Youtubue Music Premium - Just the music
£11.99 Youtube Premium - same as above, but ad-free videos in youtube along with movies and tv shows

Family

£14.99
£17.99

uvarvu · 27 Sep 2018 at 08:24

I use it every day but for videos not music. They gave me a three month trial which has just expired and I'm going to keep it going. When I get round to walking through the bluetooth headphones minefield then I'll probably use the music aspect more often. The no advert aspect of youtube is brilliant and I've found myself use the picture in picture mode a fair bit as well which surprised me.

glenimp617 · 27 Sep 2018 at 10:19

uvarvu said:
I use it every day but for videos not music. They gave me a three month trial which has just expired and I'm going to keep it going. When I get round to walking through the bluetooth headphones minefield then I'll probably use the music aspect more often. The no advert aspect of youtube is brilliant and I've found myself use the picture in picture mode a fair bit as well which surprised me.

Thanks, are you going to pay the £9.99 or the family plan and try to get them to give you something towards it?

Rimsy · 27 Sep 2018 at 10:44

Purely as a music service it was pretty poor in comparison to Google Play Music when I tried it. No ads on YouTube is nice but not enough to entice me over.

jpaul · 27 Sep 2018 at 11:16

Is their service any better than the 128Kb/s aac or (sometimes) 156Kb/s webm codec ?
they used to have 192Kb/s aac and that was much better than now
(5 minute googling did not give me the answer)

glenimp617 · 27 Sep 2018 at 12:52

There is an option now "always high" whatever that means

320 should be standard imho

uvarvu · 27 Sep 2018 at 14:07

TheOracle said:
Thanks, are you going to pay the £9.99 or the family plan and try to get them to give you something towards it?

I'm on the £11.99 plan. I asked my wife if she wanted me to subscribe to a family account but she's not really interested.

WILD9 · 27 Sep 2018 at 15:21

Rimsy said:
Purely as a music service it was pretty poor in comparison to Google Play Music when I tried it. No ads on YouTube is nice but not enough to entice me over.

You don't have to stop using GPM, the subscription includes both. I pay the extra not to have YouTube adverts, I haven't actually used the YouTube Music service at all yet.

glenimp617 · 27 Sep 2018 at 17:17

GPM properly supports bluetooth metadata, whereas spotify and YT music doesn't

jpaul · 27 Sep 2018 at 18:01

TheOracle said:
320 should be standard imho

my comment was not clear - this is what youtube uses

jpaul said:
Is their service any better than the 128Kb/s aac or (sometimes) 156Kb/s webm codec ?
they used to have 192Kb/s aac and that was much better than now
(

and I wondered what youtube music is, in comparison.

below excerpt from june, suggest ytm it is indeed just 128Kb/s aac ... youtube is now no soundfest imhop - I just go there to hear soud~~bytes~~bites.

When it comes to sound, it’s important to note that there is no option to upgrade the audio quality. So, currently, you’re stuck with a standard AAC 128kbps bitrate with a good network connection. It will dip to 64kbps if the connection quality is poor. The company says that there will be an update “soon” that will allow a higher 256kbps bitrate option. In comparison to other music services, Apple Music streams at 256kbps, and a premium Spotify subscription allows up to a 320kbps bitrate.

but this this less authoritative article suggest 'up to' 320Kb/s

[
whereas tidal is unambiguous
From Tidal Website:

What Is The Difference Between Normal, High, And HiFI?

HiFi - Lossless FLAC:
16bit / 44.1 KHz 1411Kbps FLAC Files on average will consume about 10MB of data per minute of content.
4 minute track ~ 40 MB of Data that is either used when streaming, or storage space required

High - AAC 320 Kbps:
AAC files found under the high setting on average will consume about 2.4 MB of data per minute of content.
4 minute track ~ 9.6 MB of data that is either used when streaming, or storage space required

Normal - AAC+ 96 Kbps:
AAC+ tracks found in the normal setting on average will consume about 720 KB of data per minute of content
4 minute track ~ 2.88 MB of data that is either used when streaming, or storage space required.

tidal high is £10p/m , but maybe device count is limited
]

Rimsy · 27 Sep 2018 at 22:29

WILD9 said:
You don't have to stop using GPM, the subscription includes both. I pay the extra not to have YouTube adverts, I haven't actually used the YouTube Music service at all yet.

I've been a GPM subscriber for years yet had to pay extra for YouTube premium... you must have got lucky (or me unlucky!)
*Edit* never mind misunderstood

WILD9 · 28 Sep 2018 at 09:19

Rimsy said:
I've been a GPM subscriber for years yet had to pay extra for YouTube premium... you must have got lucky (or me unlucky!)
*Edit* never mind misunderstood

Reading back my post was a little unclear...

----

YT Music isn't feature complete yet they rushed it out the door, eg no playlist import from GPM, no access to uploaded music, no android auto support etc. Google have acknowledged this too, I believe the plan is for them to keep updating YT Music until they get feature parity and then shutter GPM.

jpaul · 2 Feb 2019 at 11:18

*REVIVAL*

Playing catchup but just realised youtube music offers 256Kb/s AAC .. so that explain the demise of decent audio quality on std youtube
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-music-lossless-906589/

I suppose it's targetted as a competitor to spotify etc - no cheaper anyway - so maybe that's no surprise

Pawnless Endgame · 2 Feb 2019 at 23:49

Jpaul, are you still considering your options or have you already subbed for YouTube Music?

The other option would have been to stay with Spotify but on a friends and family account. It's £15 a month, and for me I went 3-ways with 2 friends so that we each pay £5 a month. Basically the account holder pays the £15 in full and me and the other guy set up a standing order of £5 on the day that the £15 goes out.

jpaul · 4 Feb 2019 at 22:10

I wasn't the OP, but want to keep up with the options -

At the moment, a relativley content Tidal user .... but 'sharing''s a good idea,
I'm surprised spotify/tidal/sky are not more stringent about IP addresses used to access their services

Disco_P · 5 Feb 2019 at 22:26

I've been signed up to youtube premium for 200 Russian Roubles pm (about £2.40pm) for a few months without a problem. Used a Russian VPN to sign up but access the service without a VPN and have no issues.

I am also on my sister's spotify family despite my account address being completely different and living in different countries.

I think these services are happy that some money is coming in each month rather than ensuring that they are getting the exact amount of pounds every 28 days.

Scam · 6 Feb 2019 at 08:46

WILD9 said:
I believe the plan is for them to keep updating YT Music until they get feature parity and then shutter GPM.

God I hope not. GPM is great and I have a life time deal (beta subscriber) at £7.99 month. YT Music looks terrible, I want to listen to music not watch Cardi B jiggling her bits around and pouting everywhere.

Kanpai · 7 Feb 2019 at 14:54

Have just signed up for YouTube Premium (Music included).

The audio quality seems better than Spotify and I quite like the UI of the app/website.

Main reason for Premium was no ads as I do watch a lot of things on YouTube, but the music is a nice bonus.

R3X · 7 Feb 2019 at 17:02

Youtube Premium is 256kbps AAC so it should be very similar if not the same to 320kbps, I think once they merge google play and youtube music services together it should be better. I think people get youtube premium free if they already subscribe to google play.

I would however look around, tidal, deezer, spotify are more dedicated music services, check for promos many of those do 3 months trials for 99p or check spoticheap or flebay lots of cheaper membership deals especially if you get the voucher codes, many deals on hotukdeals also.

jpaul · 8 Feb 2019 at 08:41

[ without starting a new thread I'll shoe horn this in .... ]

In the context of Mobile phones are there phones/smart-watches that can do justice to a 320Kbs AAC ?

Maybe, if you have an external usb DAC/AMP plus wired head-phones, for bluetooth headphones, however, I cannot find phones that are able to send the AAC stream, without re-encodong it, directly to headphones ?

Had read a number of threads on this
https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/90jja1/android_80_aptx_vs_aac/
https://www.soundguys.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-bluetooth-headphones-aac-20296/

It looks like blue-tooth 5.0 on the Iphone X, might work one day, but otherwise, phones seem to re-encode the stream, and indeed from a battery life perspective, you are then (news to me) better using Apt-X

This Android hack looks interesting https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/software-hacking/improve-bluetooth-audio-quality-t3832615/page2

Tidal are doing this too, which could benefit folks with a DAC .. 96Khz/24bit
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18168482/tidal-master-quality-recordings-android-users-mqa-hifi-premium-ces-2019