YouTube Music

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The streaming music field is packed with companies battling for your auditory attention. YouTube Music, an extension of Google’s entertainment arm, stands out from rival services by combining on-demand playback with hyper-focused playlists, search-by-lyrics functionality, official studio releases, community uploads, music videos, podcasts, and other entertaining features. This excellent mix makes the service a multifaceted Editors' Choice winner alongside Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, and Spotify.

YouTube Music: Free and Paid Plans

YouTube Music is the company's most focused and complete music service. It features more than 100 million official songs, plus millions of covers, performances, and other recordings. It's a truly comprehensive catalog.

You can fire up YouTube Music using a browser or mobile app. The service is free to use, with ads peppered between tracks. Sure, the ads aren’t ideal, but they’re generally short, and you can skip, replay, or scrub through as many tracks as you'd like during a listening session. That's impressive for a free service, considering that many others, including LiveOne and SiriusXM Internet Radio, limit your hourly song skips.

The $10.99-per-month YouTube Music Premium plan lets you eliminate pesky ads, download tracks for offline listening on mobile devices, and enjoy Smart Downloads. With Smart Downloads, YouTube Music automatically downloads frequently listened-to music (up to 500 tracks!) and similar songs and playlists. It's a fantastic tool for music recommendations. You can deactivate this feature in the Settings menu if you don't fancy it. Don't want to pay that much for music? LiveOne has an ad-free, $2.99-per-month (when billed annually) Plus plan with fewer features.

Like Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, and many other paid streaming music services, YouTube Music has a family plan. The option lets people access YouTube Music's catalog and premium features for $16.99 per month. It also offers a student discount of $5.49 per month. In addition, if you subscribe to YouTube Premium—the company's $13.99-per-month ad-free entertainment network—YouTube Music Premium is bundled as part of the package.

Data-Driven Recommendations

The YouTube Music homepage has three main sections: Home, Explore, and Library. Home is where you find recommended content (more on that later). Explore is where trending songs, live performances, and deep cuts live. Library contains your liked songs, favorite albums, listening history, and created playlists. We were happy to see our holiday playlist created on regular old YouTube carried over here, for example. The homepage is well-designed, easy to navigate, and attractive.

YouTube Music leverages Google's mountains of data on its users to provide customized experiences—at least, that's the goal. If you're in an airport, for example, YouTube Music should deliver relaxing tunes for the stressful flight experience. At the gym, YouTube Music should feed you heart-pumping beats and riffs.

In our tests, YouTube Music detected the time of day and our location and served us the appropriate playlists. For example, it suggested listening to the energy-boosting Classic Rock Party and 90s Hip Hop Party playlists in the early morning. During the evening, YouTube Music recommended several commute-focused playlists with Rock, Hip-Hop, and Classic driving tunes. The weather even plays a role; YouTube Music Premium detected clear skies in New York City, which resulted in the Feel Good Favorites playlist. If you're okay with exchanging your personal data for customized playlists, it's a really slick, if somewhat sobering, experience.

Samples is another music discovery tool. This feature draws from your listening preferences and highlights 30-second, vertical video shorts of recommended tracks in a dedicated tab. You can like, add to a playlist, share, or play the full song from there. You can also select Short to make a YouTube Short with said song. Navigating this tab is a cinch: You simply swipe up or down to move on to the next recommended track. Though curiously TikTok-like at a glance, Samples serves an entirely different purpose, and the additional recommendations are a welcome inclusion to the service.

Another valuable feature is the Shazam-like listening tool next to the YouTube Music search bar microphone icon. When tapped, the microphone captures and identifies audio from a song playing in the background, spoken lyrics, or even hummed melodies. It correctly identified the Harry Potter theme when we hummed it. In another experiment, we played an AI performance of Patrick Star singing Afroman's "Because I Got High," which the tool correctly identified. It's a welcome feature for those times when you can't place a track.

Let AI Take the Wheel

YouTube Music is experimenting with AI-generated playlists like those rolled out to Amazon Music Unlimited, Deezer, and Spotify. You can find it on your YouTube Music homepage under a new prompt labeled "Ask for music any way you like it." The AI feature is experimental, so it's not available everywhere. For example, I saw it on when using my Pixel 6 Pro, but could not find the option on my iPhone 15 Pro Max.

You use text, emojis, or even spoken prompts to create clever playlists for almost anything you can think of. Enter a hot and cold emoji for a Chillhop Beats playlist featuring "Cold as Ice" by Foreigner, "Hot for Teacher" by Van Halen, and "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice. If you're in the mood for something more combative, ask for ninja-slaying music and receive Ninja Slayer Jams, featuring "Samurai" by Lupe Fiasco, "The Final Countdown" by Europe, and "Crane/White Lightning" by the RZA/Charles Bernstein.

It works well in practice, though it has some kinks. YouTube Music didn't create a playlist when requesting said ninja-slaying playlist with text prompts. But when making the same request via the microphone, it produced the resulting playlist.

Scrolling and Real-Time Lyrics in YouTube Music

YouTube Music has another cool gimmick: lyrics-based searches. You can type, "Took a test to become an MC and didn't fail," into the search box, hit the enter key, and see RUN-DMC's "Rock Box" accurately listed as a result. That said, that same search returned Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" for some inexplicable reason. Nonetheless, it’s a great little tool to use when all you know about a song are a few lyrics. YouTube Music also features lyrics for official music streams, which is a wonderful feature to use to sing along with, or figure out the dense verbiage in Snow’s “Informer.”

Lyrics are enhanced with real-time auto-scrolling functionality, similar to Spotify's Live Lyrics feature. This is a convenient karaoke-like element, though it still has a few kinks that must be ironed out. For instance, not all vocal tracks support real-time lyrics. In addition, the scrolling is slightly inconsistent, so the highlighted text is occasionally out of sync with the sung words. We hope to see this functionality improved in the future.

The YouTube Music Listening Experience

Of course, YouTube Music also recommends songs, albums, and playlists based on songs you've liked or listened to in the past. While researching The Offspring for a project, our YouTube Music feed was flooded with Korn, Limp Bizkit, and other suburban, aggro-rock tracks. The algorithm works, regardless of taste.

In terms of audio quality, the streamed music sounds good. Neither the YouTube Music app nor the web version displays the audio-quality specifics, but a quick look at the service's Help page provides answers. Music tracks stream at Low, Normal, and High qualities, which carry 48Kbps AAC, 128Kbps AAC, and 256Kbps AAC bit rates, respectively. High quality is only available to Premium users. Naturally, the bit rate dips if you stream music over a weak connection. The average music listener with decent headphones will melt into a world of big beats, soft vibes, and hard rock. However, the service lacks hi-res audio. Audiophiles with more discerning ears may want to check out Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Qobuz, or Tidal for master-quality sound.

YouTube Music's listening options include podcasts, music, and comedy, which puts the service on par with competitors. Over the last few years, streaming music services have expanded to offer non-music content, such as news and weather updates (LiveOne), podcasts (Deezer, Spotify), editorial (Tidal), concert listings (iHeartRadio), or live radio streams (SiriusXM Internet Radio). YouTube Music also features collaborative playlists, so you can share and edit playlists with your friends, and vice versa. Hopefully, your friendship can endure the inevitable "Never Gonna Give You Up” additions to your favorite playlist.

YouTube Music Podcasts

Podcasts now have their own dedicated tab, which is long overdue considering you can find them on the video-focused YouTube. Selecting Podcasts brings you to a podcast page organized by category. It features topics like Music, Political Commentary, Arts & Fiction, History, True Crime, and Religion & Spirituality.

You can rewind a show by 10 seconds, or skip ahead by 30 seconds. Additionally, you can save the episode for later listening, or add it to a playlist. In a nice touch, you can swap between audio or video versions of the show (if available), as you can with some music tracks.

Video Music Box

Naturally, YouTube Music has lots of video. If you search for Flatbush Zombies, the results page will contain a dedicated video section where you can view official music videos and content uploaded from the community. Most streaming music services only serve up official music videos, but YouTube Music gives you official content alongside karaoke tracks, people performing covers in their bedrooms, and other random uploads. If you like journeying down YouTube rabbit holes, you'll dig the lack of curation.

Still, we understand if someone dislikes this open-door approach to video content. If only official music videos will do, take a look at Tidal to sidestep the fluff and enjoy a robust selection of videos in its curated library.

YouTube Music Mobile Apps

In addition to the easily accessible browser-based version, YouTube Music is available on the Android and iOS platforms. We spent much time experimenting with the iOS version on an iPhone.

The app is similar to the desktop version, with a simple, attractive, grid-based interface that places playlists front and center. With Music Premium, you can download playlists and let the app play in the background as you toy with other apps. The Explore section is a great way to see what’s new and hot in the music world and enjoy live performances and deep cuts. Like the desktop version, the mobile app features official lyrics, so you can easily sing along. We encountered no crashing or freezing during our many hours of listening.

Verdict: YouTube Music Is a Top-Tier Streaming Music Service

YouTube Music's location- and time-based playlists, search-by-lyrics functionality, and lack of skip-throttling are all strong points in its favor. The service's gargantuan selection of tunes from film, video games, and the music industry as a whole, as well as podcasts and fan remixes, make exploration fun. If you like recommendation-heavy listening and don't mind a lack of hi-res audio, YouTube Music is well worth considering and an Editors' Choice winner for streaming music services.