YouTube Music is almost perfect, but this missing Spotify feature breaks the deal

01 Sep 2026, 16:30 by Ben Khalesi · Android Police

The cycle begins every year the same way.

A notification pops up on my phone. A penny shy of $12 was taken from my checking account for Spotify Premium. I look at it, frown, and do the mental arithmetic.

I am already paying approximately $14 a month for YouTube Premium. That includes a full subscription to YouTube Music. The math feels like a slap in the face.

I'm shelling out about $144 a year for Spotify when I have YouTube Music for basically free.

Ideally, I should cancel Spotify and move my playlists to YouTube Music. So, I do it. I start the annual migration. I tell myself that this time, things will be different.

So I deleted Spotify, and then, three weeks later, I was back.

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Separating YouTube and YouTube Music is a pain

I don't want to watch videos when I'm listening to music

If we're trying to trace where my frustration with YouTube Music really begins, we have to start at the root cause. The biggest mistake is the shared like button.

In the world of music apps — Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal — the like (or plus, or heart) is how you curate your music.

In the world of videos — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram — the like says, I enjoyed this quick distraction. Keep showing me more like it.

In its push for a unified ecosystem, Google mashed these two concepts into one.

The other day, I was scrolling through YouTube when I found this anime fight montage. I tapped the like to show some love to the creator.

The next morning, I got in my car and opened YouTube Music. Out of nowhere, that anime remix started playing.

When I liked that video on YouTube, I didn't realize it would end up in my music library. My carefully curated collection was polluted by memes and random content.

Fed up, I looked for a fix and found that you can filter your liked YouTube videos so they don't pollute your music library. But the bleed happens both ways, and there's no perfect fix.

My Liked Videos playlist on YouTube is now flooded with hundreds of songs.

The only way to keep things separate right now is to use a second account for either YouTube or YouTube Music, and your main account for the other.

YouTube Music's free tier is enough now that I discovered these Android workarounds

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Spotify's audio-first database vs. YouTube's video-first mess

I only want to see one track on my screen

Spotify uses an audio-first database. A song is a distinct entity with rigid metadata (such as Artist, Album, and Year). It sits in a relational database designed for discographies.

YouTube uses a video-first database. This is why, when you search for a song on YouTube Music, you often see five versions. The official audio, the music video, the lyric video, a fan upload, and a live version.

On Spotify, there is one canonical track. On YouTube, there are five videos that all sound like the track.

Managing this mess means a lot of manual work, and the app doesn't give you the tools to do it easily.

Organizing playlists on YouTube Music is a nightmare

There has got to be a better way

I am a library person. I like folders. I like sorting. I like knowing that if I add an album, it stays there, in the order I placed it.

Spotify, for all its recent UI changes, still respects the concept. I can sort my liked songs by title, artist, album, and more.

YouTube Music treats the Library with active disdain. It wants you in the feed. When you sort a large playlist on YouTube Music, your options are limited to Manual or Newest First/Last.

Want to sort your playlist (which might have 3,000 songs) alphabetically by Artist to find all your David Bowie tracks? You simply can't. You are expected to move them one by one, like a medieval scribe copying a manuscript.

Even when you accept that the app fights you when you try to organize. Dragging and dropping songs in a playlist on the web interface is buggy.

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I have a problem with the Samples tab in YouTube Music

It doesn't show me the music I want to hear

Nothing exemplifies the video-first law at the heart of YouTube Music more than the Samples tab.

In 2025, every app wants to be TikTok. X, Reddit, and Instagram all have a vertical, infinite-scroll video feed.

YouTube Music, not wanting to be left out, introduced Samples and put it in prime real estate in the bottom navigation bar.

While Spotify also offers short videos for discovery, it keeps them out of the main navigation.

The idea behind Samples is discovery. But instead of showing me my usual music, it throws up Japanese shamisen videos.

I guess that's because I binge-watched Japanese music for cultural research on YouTube, and now it's stuck on that.

So if you're getting into this, I recommend a new account since your music profile is already mixed up by all the videos you watch.

YouTube Music has an identity crisis

YouTube Music is not a bad product. If you view it as a feature of YouTube Premium, it is an incredible value.

The catalog is vast. The price is effectively zero if you are a Premium subscriber.

But as a standalone replacement for Spotify? It fails.

It fails not on content, but on intent. Apps like Spotify and Apple Music are all about building the world's best audio library. Every feature focuses on what audio listeners need.

YouTube Music, on the other hand, is an extension of the YouTube video empire running in the background. Everything is designed around video.

Until Google decides to build a music app that is about music, I will keep paying my $12 tribute to Spotify. Keeping a clean library is worth the price of a sandwich every month.