For the past few years, I’ve been pretty happily subscribed to YouTube Music via YouTube Premium. Not only does it save me from ads on either platform, but Google has slowly turned YouTube Music into a pretty decent streaming service. There’s a lot to like about it.
However, I haven’t used Spotify since we were in the think of the Covid-19 pandemic, and even then, I wasn’t subscribed to it. So, I thought it might be good to revisit the app and actually take advantage of Spotify Premium to see what I’ve been missing out on.
Most of my friends and family use Spotify, and it seems much more omnipresent than the other music streaming apps when it comes to third-party integration. It’s pretty hard to escape Spotify, and using YouTube Music, I often feel a bit left out when new features are released or when anyone shares links to songs that I can’t listen to because I’m not subscribed.
After using Spotify exclusively for the past month, here are the things I like about the app, the things I still miss about YouTube Music, and whether or not I could see myself making the switch permanent.
The features that made me switch
The decision to switch didn’t come to me overnight. It’s something that I first considered doing during a New Year’s Eve trip in 2023 when I was in Hawaii with my friends. Someone is usually playing music for us to enjoy while we’re relaxing, playing games, or driving to and fro. Everyone else had Spotify, which I didn’t normally think about much prior to the trip, but there was one feature in particular that made me realize just how much I was missing out.
Spotify Jam is an incredibly useful feature that launched in the fall of 2023. It lets one person set up a “Jam,” which is essentially a queue of tunes that they can invite others… (truncated)…