YouTube Music isn’t perfect, but it’s clearly catching on

From the get-go, YouTube Music had a rough start. As the forced replacement for the beloved Google Play Music, people like myself pushed back on the adoption of Google’s new music service right away simply due to the fact that we all hated the fact that they were arbitrarily taking away a service we already loved.

As Google is prone to do, it was easy to see the move as a poorly-planned pivot without any real upside. And at the time, that’s actually exactly what it was. YouTube Music launched without many of the features we’d had for years with Google Play Music (like simple casting from the web player), and as much as I knew the time to switch would eventually be foisted upon me, I clung to Play Music until the bitter end.

As time has passed, however, Google has finally managed to give YouTube Music most (if not all) the benefits I loved with Google Play Music, and the tie-in with the music scene already alive and well on YouTube makes a lot of sense now. I knew that was the end goal, but seeing the two services play off of one another is a pretty cool thing these days.

A lot of people use YouTube Music now

Still, up until recently, I’d personally been back and forth with YouTube Music since it is included in my coveted YouTube Premium subscription. My car has a few music services installed from the factory, and YouTube Music wasn’t one of them. So I dabbled with Spotify for a while as I waited for an update that would let me use YouTube Music for everything – including my car – and that update happened in 2024.

These days, I use YouTube Music for all my streaming needs. The library is vast and the cohesion with standard YouTube is a nice partnership that only enhances the experience. And I’m clearly not alone. As of January this year, YouTube Music has a whopping 5 billion downloads – that’s 5X that of Spotify’s 1 billion downloads on the Play Store.

Sure, not every person who installs YouTube Music is still using it or pays for Premium, but that number is still wildly impressive. For a service that was so maligned just a few years ago to have that sort of reach is pretty wild, and I’m happy Google stuck to their guns with it and saw the transition all the way through.

I don’t have many gripes with YouTube Music any longer, and I like the pace that new features show up and I love that the UI continues to see regular updates. My one and only complaint is the way you follow artists with the “subscribe” action.

This gets a bit muddy with your standard YouTube subscriptions, but I’ve even learned to deal with that as well. I don’t spend a ton of time (and I bet you don’t either) digging through my subscriptions one by one, so the fact that all the music artists I subscribe to on YouTube Music are in my standard YouTube subscriptions isn’t a huge bother any longer. Still, I’d love to see them separate the two as they’ve done for likes on standard videos and Shorts.

Overall, though, it feels like YouTube Music has arrived. While they didn’t need 5 billion downloads to prove anything, it’s a big number that puts this application in rarefied air. And my hope is, with this sort of adoption and common use across many of Google’s core hardware options, it won’t go anywhere anytime soon.