Same. I watch more YouTube than probably any other streaming service. Plus I got the family plan and I sell the extra seats to my extended family and friends. Works out to be pretty cheap in the end.
I do the same for Spotify, Disney plus. Formally Netflix but they cut down on password sharing
I don't pay for either but I use both and the youtube music desktop ui is really really bad. Plus the annoying thing of it often playing music videos instead of the normal song. I definitely like it better on mobile though
You can toggle video or song. I actually like yt music way more because it can play pretty much anything on YT, including hours and hours of mixes you won't find on Spotify.
I've had a different experience. When I have it on video, it'll play the music video version, and when I have it on song, it'll play the studio version. Maybe that doesn't work for every song, but it definitely has worked that way for me.
It definitely is better, but it sill has some stupid quirks that in some cases could probably be fixed by few lines of code, like not locking the screen when you are on the lyrics screen. It also is very slow to start-up in offline mode, which drives me nuts. But otherwise it is much better performant than Spotify and has better ways to listen to new music, instead of the dumb intelligent randomize feature on Spotify.
Honestly it's the social aspect. Everyone I know uses Spotify, so sharing playlists and tracks are super easy. I know there's converters out there but I can't be arsed to do that every time I want to send or receive a link. I've also got some shared playlists between friends we all contribute to. At social gathering I can turn on the party mode or whatever it's called and let people add stuff to the queue. The big one though is I've got a few friends with really good taste. I can check in on them from time to time to see what they're listening to right now. Found a lot of great stuff this way.
Mate, you can't use basically anything today then. Your car probably collects data on you. I'm not saying I love it, but life's too short for me to cut everything trying to collect my data out of my life. Gotta pick and choose my battles.
If you block ads everywhere else then it doesn’t really matter. Pi.hole, AdGuard, proton vpn, Firefox will all block ads for you on pretty much every other site on the planet.
Yeah until it gets shot by A/B testing again lol. I love newpipe, but for somebody with a family it's hard to justify, especially bc the non-techies of the fam are gonna want something that 'just works'.
Like it or not the platform is full of people trying to make a living independently producing content. Most of them are not making very much money. Watching with an adblocker means they aren’t earning any revenue, which is unsustainable. Watching with a Premium subscription means I don’t see ads and they get more revenue (even more so than ad-supported views).
Those people aren’t massive corporations. They’re independent creators. And generally speaking the content I watch on YouTube is content I want to support.
I’m not trying to say it’s like, inherently ethically wrong to watch YouTube without ads or Premium. But it certainly isn’t ethically superior.