If You Can Spit, I Can Roast: A Hyperbolized and Satirical Review of YouTube Music

Hello, it’s me again!

That’s right, your alleged expert in streaming media, the one and only Pierce Aubergine. You might remember me from my satirical and snarky review of Apple Music, my rejection tape from Real Housequeers of The Planet, or from my performance in Grrs Gone Wilde, a bear interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s unpublished works* done in drag, set in the forest. Anyways, I’m your friend to talk to you about the music streaming services I’ve tried, up close and personal. So open wide (your eyes and ears, you pervert) and get ready for a heaping plate of disappointment. Because today, we’re talking about (*dramatic music plays*) … YouTube Music.

YouTube Music

I’m reluctant to call it a streaming service, but since all of us using Google Play Music are being taken over in a Delorean to a user experience that feels like the beginning of streaming as a thing, I’ll share my piece. YTM is so bad, it’s like they took every way music streaming has gotten better, threw it away and called their trial a new thing. It’s like they took a widget for YouTube and changed its dimensions to app-sized so they could up its price point.

The Good

Obscure, YouTube-Only Content. As a lover of electronic music, there are some DJs who post content to YouTube that you can’t find anywhere else. With YouTube Music, you can listen to it all and also listen to live recordings and your more mainstream tastes in the same app. Dope.

Dark Mode. It’s 2020, and I’m listing dark mode as a plus. And let me be clear, my comment on what I like about the UI is that it’s in dark mode. Otherwise, might as well be in Comic Sans.

The Bad

Sound Quality. If sound quality were sound qualitea, this tea would be day-old 20 year old Lipton. Remember back when flip phones had 1 dot of reception and voices were garbled and you got charged overage minutes for waiting? Yeah that’s what the music sounds like. I’ve heard groups of cats singing opera sound better than this garbage.

They Push YouTube Playlists. If you want to listen to albums, you’re gonna have to look them up yourself. They don’t recommend albums — they have a listener who thinks that albums aren’t a thing in mind. When looking through catalogs, the albums aren’t sorted in a logical order either. Some artists had stuff that was really hard to find.

Everything Great About Google Play Music Is Gone Or Ruined. GPM’s entire catalog? Not here. The amazing, curated stations that happened when Google acquired Songza? Nope. They’ve been turned into “playlists” with the same title as the station and none of the same charm. Near as I can tell, you can’t even buy an album in the Google Play store and get it in into your YouTube Music library, unless you import it from Google Play Music. It’s a year behind, too.

The Radio Algorithm Makes Me Want To Listen To My Car’s Radio. The stations don’t make sense — I don’t enjoy them, and they will inevitably go to a list of my usual music from whatever artist.

To Sum Up

YouTube Music is completely fine. No, really. And I bet if I tried it first, I’d love it. The audio quality is adequate, it’s just not incredible — which is a big weakness in a market where competition serves incredible. The streaming world is so big that you honestly can’t go wrong. Services are competing so hard that the differences between them are nitty-gritty things. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we live in a world where you can literally hear millions of songs from different services for less than the cost of a CD each month. How much could there be to gripe about with that? I’ll see you next time… just not on YouTube Music.

• Author’s note: Brett G., the guy who wrote it, told me that we could totally trust that what he handed us to perform was actually written by Oscar Wilde, but we’d never heard of it for good reason.