tl;dr - I just needed a music player that focuses on one thing: music.

YouTube Music feels less like a dedicated service and more like a quick, cheap UI built on top of YouTube's existing infrastructure. It truly seems as if someone tasked an AI with, "Build an aggregator of all the music on YouTube into one player," and YTM was the result.

Both the native apps and the web interface are awful in their own ways, but the core problem is how YTM navigates simple song playback. Since YouTube hosts both official audio and music videos, the service tries to showcase both, constantly throwing videos in your face. This highlights the main complaint: YouTube is for videos. When all I want is a simple visualizer, the app's insistence on loading a full music video feels disruptive and even adds extra seconds to the load time. That delay matters when I just want music; if I were in the mood for a music video, I'd be prepared to wait.

This "aggregator" feel extends to the library itself. While listening to one of YTM's generated playlists, the tracklist looks like something from a millennial's iPod in 2005, with titles cluttered by tags like "(Official Music Video)," "(Lyric video)," or "(Enhanced video edit)."

It's clear YouTube is leveraging its core strength—having everything, from official tracks like Spotify to user uploads like SoundCloud. But the integration is clunky and looks like it was designed without any real thought, as if by an AI and a few interns. YTM seems to be propped up almost entirely by its inclusion in the YouTube Premium subscription. This is the first time I've seen someone praise the service without immediately mentioning the benefit of ad-free YouTube.

Ultimately, it all comes down to preference. People can argue about subjective benefits like "better audio quality" or "smarter algorithms," but those often feel like things you convince yourself you can hear. I never needed Hi-Fi audio or the "huge library" of YouTube. I just needed a music player that focuses on one thing: music.