About six months ago, I wrote my opinion on two competing music streaming platforms—YouTube Music and Spotify. Recently, I decided to test both services again. So, I purchased a one-month Spotify subscription and got to work.
Has my opinion changed?
Things I missed during the first test
First, I noticed some things about Spotify that I had forgotten. For some reason, I used to think Spotify pulled lyrics explanations from Genius. Imagine my disappointment when I found only the lyrics instead of any deeper meaning or context.
While Spotify’s live lyrics are nice, it’s no longer an exclusive advantage—YouTube Music has introduced it as well. However, Spotify’s implementation isn’t flawless. The synchronization often lags or jumps ahead by a full line, which can be frustrating. This feature still needs some fine-tuning to work perfectly.
I also noticed something that really annoyed me. I’m used to playing a song and relying on automatic suggestions to keep the music going. So, as usual, I searched for a song and hit play.
However, Spotify has an issue where songs often appear as single albums in search results. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but autoplay doesn’t work correctly in these cases. Instead of playing a suggested track, Spotify would just repeat the same song—even with loop turned off and autoplay enabled.
This meant I had to manually switch songs, which became frustrating. YouTube Music never had this issue, making its autoplay feature far more reliable in comparison.
However, there is one feature in Spotify that I really liked—playlist enhancement. I was genuinely impressed by how Spotify suggests new songs to expand user playlists. This is something YouTube Music lacks, and honestly, I kind of miss it.
Conclusion
But did this retest make me switch to a different favorite platform? Not really. Both Spotify and YouTube Music are great, and which one you choose ultimately depends on your personal preferences.
Spotify definitely has good deals for couples and students, but overall, the differences between the two platforms aren’t that significant. Personally, I won’t be switching to Spotify because YouTube Premium offers more benefits for a similar price—especially for students.
Leave a Reply