Spotify vs Youtube for music
I've been using spotify since middle school and started watching youtube around elementary school, so i've grown-up a lot with both apps. Before I used spotify I used to listen to music from youtube or directly on my really old cell phone and looking back it was a very difrerent experience. I was learning about my music taste at the time so I remember i'll just listen to pretty much the same artists and songs, I think that when I finally got serious about listening to music I gave Spotify an opportunity, it was getting popular after all.
Since I used Spotify I started to make my own playlists and follow new muscicians, having a dedicated space for my musical experience was really nice. With every feature they added I was more hooked to the app and almost never used youtube for listening to music.
Then one day, Youtube recomended me a song out of the blue and I liked it, I really loved the recomendation so I kept looking for more and more music on youtube, that's when I started to make music playlist on youtube too.
After using both for many years I finnaly realized every plataform has its pros and cons.
Spotify
I've seen lots of people complaining about Spotify and I do it too, I can't say it's the perfect music plataform out there but for me it's good enough. Maybe I just got used to it since I've been using it for a long time. I'm now at the state where I can't fully leave it, since I have all my playlists and liked songs there.
The first con that comes to my mind is that musicians don't really get much money from it, it's a thing that allways bothered me but at the same time I couldn't do much to help myself since I have no money and can't even pay the suscription, so I can't say ads are a problem or a con to me. Besides that, other thing I don't like is the recommended songs for autoplay1 (I desactivated this function recently because I really don't like it) It's strange that after a lot of years, spotify can't fully recommend good new music for me.
For pros, I like doing blends with my friends2. It's nice to see how much compatible we are and have a changing playlist with both of our liked songs. I also like to get notified of new music releases, sometimes I forget about an artist and it's nice discovering that new album they made. I heard it once in a video, Spotify gives commodity, it's easy to use after all, but it really depends of what the user wants. For example, I can't say Spotify it's for a music lover that it's obssed with music, but I think it goes well for casual music listeners.
Youtube
Now, with youtube I have an overall good experience (I won't talk about youtube music since I've barealy used it). Lately I've been listening to more music on youtube. As I said before, for some reason youtube it's better for music recomendations, that is one pro I really like and the main reason why I use it now. I noticed more pros on youtube lately, one of them are covers.
I'm always amazed by the quantity of covers they are and I apreciate it, because when I like a song I love to hear all the different versions that people make. I love listening from acoustic covers to remixes and most produced covers. And, yes, I have a playlist for that. Another great thing about listening on youtube is live performances. I like to hear a lot of unique live performances, concerts, busking, and live studios, you can find anything.
What about the cons? There is a big one that I hate and is that often with live performances or other long video formats, there can be ads in the middle, sometimes they even cut a song. I don't mind if they put ads on videos, I'm used to it, but could you put it at the start of the video or at least where the performance it's not interrupted?3. Another small problem I've got with youtube it's that becase it's not especially for music I can get distracted by other videos that are not releated, but I think that it's more of a personal problem. Comments can also distract me from the music, but sometimes I apreciated them because they are fun to read, they tell stories or recommend more music.
So after using both, I can't say I prefer one over another. I like to use both for different purposes and I'll continue to use them like that. I haven't tried other plataforms since for now I like the system I created for myself, but if I found a good app to change to I'll give it a try, even tought the familarity I have with these apps it's strong.
Wow this was a long post. I think it's the longest I've writen so far.
I also don't like that this setting is activated by default, when I listen to a playlist I just want to listen to those songs, I don't want some other irrelevant songs playing.↩
Researching about blends, I found out you can do blends with artist too, so that's cool.↩
This has happened to me mostly on classical music performances and it's quite annoying since the flow of the music is cut. I don't know if the placing of the ads it's something you can control through.↩