Apple / music / YOUTUBE MUSIC
REVIEW
YouTube Music is the only streamer that understands music videos are part of music.
Eleven years in, Google's streamer still can't out-recommend Spotify — but the bottomless catalogue of live cuts, covers, and official videos remains unmatched.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
Eleven years after launch, YouTube Music has settled into a clear identity: it is the streamer for people who think the official video, the live unplugged take, and the album cut all belong in the same playlist. Spotify has the algorithm, Apple Music has the audio quality, and YouTube Music has everything Google’s video archive ever swallowed.
That single advantage is enough to keep it on millions of iPhones — and the reason it’s also the streamer Apple Music converts will quietly admit they keep installed in the second row of their dock. The question for 2026 isn’t whether YouTube Music has a place in the market. It’s whether Google will fix the recommendation engine before the AI-slop problem chases away the listeners the video catalogue brought in.
No other major service treats the official video, the unplugged session, and the studio cut as the same library entry.
FEATURES
YouTube Music streams the same licensed catalogue as every other major service — north of 100 million tracks — and adds the part nobody else has: the rest of YouTube. Official videos, fan-shot festival sets, NPR Tiny Desks, late-night performances, isolated stems, and decades of bootlegs all sit in the same library, queued the same way, swapped between audio and video with one tap. A track playing in the background can be flipped to its music video without losing your place.
Premium ($10.99 a month individual, $16.99 family) strips ads, enables background play on iOS, and unlocks downloads. A Google One Premium subscriber gets YouTube Premium — which includes Music — at a $2 monthly discount, currently bundled at $11.99 with the 2 TB plan. Audio caps at 256 kbps AAC, well below Apple Music's lossless tier and Spotify's HiFi rollout.
The "Music Tuner" lets you actively shape a radio station by artist variety, tempo, popularity, and mood — granular controls neither Spotify nor Apple Music expose. Smart Downloads pre-cache your likely listening offline. CarPlay, AirPlay, lock-screen lyrics, and Siri shortcuts all behave as expected on iOS.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The video integration is the genuine win and it has no real competitor. If you're the kind of listener who wants the album cut on the morning commute and the Glastonbury 2008 performance on Saturday night, no other major service treats the official video, the unplugged session, and the studio cut as the same library entry. Covers, remixes, fan uploads, and rare live recordings that Spotify and Apple Music will never license are searchable and queueable next to the canonical version.
The Premium bundle math also works harder than it looks. If you already pay for Google One at the 2 TB tier for Drive backup, layering YouTube Premium on top — which folds in ad-free YouTube, background YouTube playback, and YouTube Music — is the cheapest way to get an ad-free version of either service.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The recommendation engine is the soft spot, and 2026 made it worse. Users have spent the last several months documenting how heavily AI-generated tracks have crept into the algorithmic stations and "Discover Mix" feeds, with the standard feedback tools — thumbs-down, "don't recommend" — failing to keep them from resurfacing. Spotify's Discover Weekly remains the discovery benchmark; YouTube Music's stations still lean too hard on whatever you last watched on the main YouTube app, which produces strange jumps when your Wirecutter review videos show up in your morning playlist.
Audio quality is the other tradeoff. 256 kbps AAC is fine for AirPods on the bus, but it's the worst of the major services if you've invested in a wired DAC or a pair of planars. There's no lossless tier, no spatial audio, no Dolby Atmos catalogue. The iOS app also still occasionally double-charges users who subscribed via Apple's in-app billing and then resubscribed through google.com — a billing-flow trap that has lived in the App Store reviews for years.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you actually watch music videos, hunt down live recordings, or already pay for Google One at the 2 TB tier. Stay on Spotify if discovery is the whole reason you pay for streaming. Stay on Apple Music if you have a HomePod, lossless headphones, or AirPods Pro and the sound matters. YouTube Music is the breadth pick — and breadth is a real reason, just not the one Google keeps trying to sell you on.