Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
When it comes to premium music streaming, Spotify absolutely dominates the market, and even giants like Apple and Google struggle to draw subscribers away from it and over to their own services. Unlike the case with video streaming, it’s not really access to exclusive content that’s going to drive users to one service or the other, and we’re instead going to be thinking about things like features, community, and pricing.
A few weeks back, we had one feature in particular on our mind: the ability for these music streamers to put together “radio” playlists inspired by a specific song or artist. And while that’s pretty common capability in this space, we were specifically curious about your experiences across Spotify and YouTube Music.
While both do basically the same thing here, the experience isn’t step-by-step identical across the platforms, and when presenting you with the poll we noted how YouTube Music’s approach was much more kinetic, getting the music playing right away, and making sure it kept going.
Still, a quick start is far from the only thing that matters when you want to get a playlist going, and the quality of the selection itself is going to have a huge impact on your subjective impressions. Was there enough variety between favorites and songs that are new to you? Did all the choices feel like they aligned with the vibe you were shooting for? We put it to you, and you made your opinions very clear:
Are you happy with song radios on your music streaming service?
Whether we attracted a lot of YouTube Music fans eager to defend their choice of service against the Goliath that is Spotify, or our audience just skews towards Google-provided solutions, we can’t say, but YTM stans showed up in droves to not only participate in this poll, but to express their affinity for the app’s radio-creation skills. While Spotify users were more or less split down the middle with their opinions on song radio playlists, the vast majority of YouTube Music users feel quite positive about how Google handles it.
YouTube Music just gave subscribers a new way to generate playlists like this, too. A couple months back we saw the app start rolling out its AI-powered “Ask Music” tool, letting you just describe the sort of songs you’re looking to hear, rather than starting with a specific example.
Looking into the comments you submitted, we see a lot more satisfaction coming from YouTube Music users, with converts explicitly pointing to the “rut” they found themselves in on Spotify, while YTM made it easier for them to discover new music. And while we see a lot of enthusiasm for specific features like the ability to easily resume listening on another device, and just its general sound quality, most of you who participated are just feeling more love for YouTube Music.
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