Despite the existence of Spotify, Pandora, Google Music, etc. There is a huge group of people (among the largest on youtube) that listen to music using youtube playlists.

This was definitely true when I was in college a few years ago. I think the main reason is that (partly thanks to copyright violations) YouTube a very reliable source for finding any song you're looking for, from ultra-popular to my-buddy-made-a-track-on-ableton-once. New singles will always hit youtube, but won't always hit every streaming service, but this has gotten better in recent years.

IMO, record studios aren't satisfied with the (relatively tiny) revenue from X million views on their youtube videos, it started out as a marketing channel for them, but now they believe the play-on-demand nature is cutting into their earning (it is). From YouTube's end this is a move to appease record studios concerned and simultaneously extract more money from an existing user base.

I'm not an audiophile in terms of music quality although I'll always spring for the highest quality version I can obtain when I have the choice but so long as that's not ~Top 3 on your list of important features of your musical source than I imagine Youtube might just be the best option for a given listener who has the capability to connect to the internet, has a speaker or musical setup to play music via the computer / internet / Youtube and the ability to connect Youtube / any internet audio source up to your daily musical needs (dock in bathroom while getting ready in the morning, AUX in car, headphones / dock at work, AUX in car, bluetooth boom box at the skatepark after work, dock to wind down to audio tapes while getting ready for bed).

Depending on what "general" field of music you tend to listen to the most Youtube is arguably the best source of music in the world if you have the capability and ability to use the internet and relay it to a speaker for yourself. The reason I say 'depending' is because when it comes to popular music, historical or forgotten music, less popular music, older artists, obscure artists, obscure songs, music from non-music releases (soundtracks, music embedded into tv or movies or games, live recordings, etc.) and that's just music -- not even getting into talk radio, podcasts, interviews, sports news, sports talk, political news, political talk, and the thousands if not millions of sub-categories and genres you could dig into for more entertainment.

Youtube is undoubtedly the best source for 99% of that type of material. Now the reason that I can't say 100% is because Soundcloud really does happen to have a large and disproportionately (oddly enough) relevant segment of what's going on in music today.

I think if you are the type of person who is really into EDM and going to festivals than Soundcloud might be a better all around music app for you -- depending on what you like to listen to them most.

For the vast majority (90%+) of my casual music listening I am listening to Soundcloud. A lot of the artists I listen to are outside of the US and their artist names and/or track names might be in a language I don't understand or even be represented by characters or kanji that I can't even start to interpret let alone type into a search bar.

From the outside looking in without any context or history with Soundcloud you may not see the appeal but if I sit here and try to rationalize things without injecting my own personal opinion I guess I'd just say that Soundcloud, over the last 5-7 years, has without a doubt been the largest source for individuals and labels / label A&Rs / music executives / taste makers / influential DJs / etc. to discover and enjoy new music by new artists in a very direct way. This has led directly to many of the artists we know and hear of today being a product of discovery via the Internet and Soundcloud.

When the Spotifys, Google Musics, Pandoras, and iTunes-types talk in private I always wonder how much they pay attention to the canyon between how successful Soundcloud is in so many needed / important / relevant criteria (in terms of metrics any competing music service would dream to hit) yet at the same time being a terrible failure in terms of earnings and as a picture of a company you'd want to emulate.

I wonder how much of the insanity of Soundcloud being broke yet making their biggest artists into millionaires factors into the other competing services going about business.

You obviously have to do lots of things wrong to be as big as known as Soundcloud is yet be broke.

Also, you obviously have to do lots of things right to be as big and as known as Soundcloud, be broke, and still be able to deliver that service that has kept so many faithful patrons and contributors coming back for more all these years.

It's like a train crash that you can't look away from. Sadly enough, I have lots of important memories and slices of entertainment on that train so there's more reasons than "I'm a morbid human" for watching it explode into a fiery ball of failures.

It's almost as if google hired the people from microsoft who did it over there

The only thing I can surmise is that they either just want no part of competing in the music arena (there are definitely folks within Google that want to, are working to compete, and probably have made some great things to boot) but it definitely has never felt like something Google was pushing for in terms of it being it's flagship product / project. In a sense Google+ never really felt that way to me either, beyond just being annoyingly invasive during the rollover and there after.

It feels like with Google's back catalog of audio (via Youtube and otherwise) plus their ability to ID and catalog all types of data makes me feel that their ultimate, final form music service could be the most certain home run / competition killer ever rolled out but to me that doesn't seem AT ALL compatible with Google's new product roll out method which seems to be: quietly release new product / project and hope it catches on for being really great at what it does.

Their method of roll out, from my POV, makes them look smarter when a project without an inaudible roll out becomes a smash hit and also makes them look less "of a failure?" when their roll out of a project winds up being an eventual failure (I think they learned this lesson for the final ultimate time with Google+, if I had to guess).

I don't know if their "ideal roll out method" (from my POV, from my mind) is compatible with releasing a true "Google Music" Project / Product / Service.

In my (our?) mind(s) I (we) can clearly see all the cogs and ability and musical data and artist / music metadata to power and skin a potential "Google Music" so what is or has stopped them from releasing such a product, ultimately?

There's nothing wrong with it, besides the pathological need to write their desktop client in web technologies. I can't use Google Music because I registered and uploaded music for a Google account that isn't my primary Google account. But the client always opens to the wrong account since it shares state with my browser. But there isn't the normal user switcher that you find on other Google products. All the other competitors desktop apps are so far superior that I still pay for Spotify despite having bought 2 Google Home devices.

Just so you're aware, you already get background playback on mobile devices if you pay for YouTube Red.

I find this the height of arrogance that Google charges for this and it enrages me on a level I freely admit is irrational and pointless.

But just the gall:

1. Get FREE creative work from musicians, film types, tv types, and tons of bright friendly ordinary people

2. Monetize the hell out of it (fine)

3. Allow a sewer community of racists bullies and other terrible people to develop in comments section (negligent but ok it's gotten a little better)

4. Make it hard for visitors to extract original media even though you're purporting to be a hosting service (lame but I can live with it)

5. Cripple playback in basic ways for petty reasons (you're starting to really suck)

6. Try and CHARGE people to undo 5 (Gah!!!!! Die!!!)

I pay for a lot of things. I pay Hulu extra for the ad free version. I pay HBO for HBO Now even though I have a pirated Go login. I buy tv shows on iTunes. I'll even buy movies off friggin' Amazon if it means not pirating them. But I will never pay Google to achieve BASIC playback capabilities on other people's content just on PRINCIPLE. Never. Greedy greedy little leeches. YouTube is a great thing but the people who run it have turned Bad.

You fail to mention that YouTube allows people to monetize off the content they create. There are a whole lot of content creators whose sole income source is YouTube. Many of those videos wouldn't exist if there was no monetary incentive. So, yes, YouTube does profit off a lot of content it doesn't own, but it generates a ton too.

Not really. The truth is more that Google lured independent content creators to their platform with monetization, and is now driving them away by gasligighting them with obscure and impossible to follow rules, to make room for cable tv news shows and inane reality tv stars.

Most of my favorite youtubers have been demonetized, and had to change their content if they wanted to survive. The Alternative History channel was gaslighted pretty bad and their G-rated animated mini-documentary videos got flagged for hate speech(?), while Logan Paul made tens of thousands of dollars from YouTube monetizing his disrespecting a Japanese corpse.

Disabling background play in the YouTube app is driven from the licensing deals they have with record labels. If they don't (make a reasonable attempt to) show the ads they don't have permission to show the video/play the music.

I suspect they could theoretically allow background play for other content but that would be confusing to users.

The stuff I want to background is not music, lately it's been a lot of conference talks, and most of the time there's not even an ad.

Even when I've used YouTube for music, the ads are always pre-roll. If I watch the pre-roll ad, why not let me background at that point?

Google could allow backgrounding for content with no ads. They could allow backgrounding of non musical content if you've watched the ad (they can detect if it's music and what song it is, that's how they pay royalties to labels on songs uploaded by random people). They could allow backgrounding of musical content if you've watched the ad.

YouTube doesn't attempt to handle any of these scenarios. Handling these scenarios would involve an investment of software and possibly legal resources — only to improve the experience of millions and millions of users, and to conserve tons of energy, without making Google any money, and even potentially reducing revenue to YouTube Red (or Premium or whatever it is next week). Why would a company in a monopoly position do that? I get WHY Google won't do this. It's not about licensing, it's about money and motivations. But I'm not going to pay into it.

If there were a HackerNews Gold, I would gift this comment one. Thank you.

I came at it from the opposite direction. I prefer Google Play Music to Spotify. Google Play Music comes with a subscription to YouTube Red. Occasionally I will watch a video on YouTube. I appreciate the added value of not needing to watch ads on the occasions that I use YouTube, and knowing that I’m still supporting the content creators even though I don’t consume the ads.

But only very few countries in the world are allowed to pay for YouTube Red, and I don’t get why. I thought every creator had to agree to the terms of service, which would allow YouTube to sell ad-free access via YouTube Red all over the world.

You COULD play any YouTube video in the background on Chrome on iOS until about a year ago. YouTube specifically sabotaged their site by registering hooks that stop the video when the browser loses focus, so you can't even view something in another tab, much less turn the screen off. This "feature" is a regression with no benefit to the user, and Google was so ashamed at what they did that they didn't even tell anyone.

Luckily, you can thwart it by: 1) Requesting the desktop version of a YouTube video 2) Replacing youtube.com with hooktube.com in the address bar

Perhaps soon Google will disable the use of labels in GMail and then charge you for "GMail Red" to get access to them again.

Shitty move on their part.

To be fair YouTube has been primarily a music streaming service for years. All of the top viewed videos are music, this mostly adds an alternate UI.

For some. Not others.

My point is not that YouTube shouldn't add better Music support. My point is that it won't/can't replace something like Spotify.

In principle at least, it might be nice to have live performances and music videos too.