Here is our series of comparisons between the king of music streaming with his competitors, now with Spotify vs Youtube Music. Be sure to check out our previous articles, where we compare Spotify vs Apple Music and Spotify vs Deezer.
Spotify is one of the best, if not the best, streaming services available today. It was officially launched in 2008 and has grown steadily since then, becoming the most widely used worldwide. It arrived in Brazil in mid-2014 and nowadays everyone in the country has heard of the product or even use it.
Already the rival of the time, Youtube Music, developed by one of the subsidiaries of the largest technology company, Google. It is a platform that competes fiercely for leading position in the ranking of streaming services, even though it is very new in the field, having been officially launched in 2015 and only arrived here in 2018.
With that, let's look at these two giants and see which one is best for you.
1. Prices
Something that is always on the consumer's mind is the concern to spend as little as possible on the best service available, the best value for money and knowing this we have this section thoroughly evaluating exactly that.
Let's start this part of the Spotify vs Youtube Music comparison with the Google service. It offers several plans, including a free one which, compared to what other existing services have, is quite bad. Allows you to listen to anything you want, with advertisements, but you can not leave the application, except the music pause.
It also has several paid versions, in the monthly fee model: individual, which costs $ 16.90; family, which costs $ 25.50; and student, which costs $ 8.50. In addition, you can buy the combo between Youtube Music and Youtube Premium, with a small addition to the amount paid: the individual is $ 20.90; the family stays R $ 31,90; and the student gets $ 12.50.
Now let's talk about the Swedish service: It offers a very good free plan, which allows the user to listen to what he wants, with interruptions of advertisements and compulsory random mode; Playback quality is reduced, too, but there is no impediment to using other applications while listening to what you want.
It has several paid plans, with prices similar to those of the competitor: for the individual, R $ 16,90 per month; for the family, $ 26.90 per month; for the student, $ 8.50 per month. It also offers the double plan, which costs $ 21.90 for access to two accounts. In both services, the family plan guarantees access to 6 different accounts.
Both platforms offer a free trial period, but Spotify offers 3 months, while on Youtube Music only 1 ms.
In this section, the services tie, if you exclusively want a way to stream audio. However, thanks to the option of performing a Youtube Music combo to get YouTube Premium together, this one comes out the winner if the user uses Google's video service.
2. Audio Quality
If you are after the best app for streaming music, you will certainly consider audio quality, as this is the most important feature when it comes to listening to your favorite sounds. And since so many cell phones don't have a headphone jack these days, we've created this list of the best wireless headsets to make the most of your music.
This Spotify vs Youtube Music section will be started with the oldest of both, Spotify: It uses the Ogg format for smartphones and its computer program and the AAC format for Chromecast and the browser. Ogg playback is up to 320kbps for premium users, and up to 160kbps for free. When in AAC, it is up to 256kbps if premium and up to 128kbps if not.
Now when it comes to the option offered by Google, the sound quality offered is certainly lower, being only 256kbps in AAC format for premium users and 128kbps in the same format for free users.
Another advantage of the Swede is that he has a native equalizer within his mobile app for both Android and iOS, but is not in computer applications. By comparison, Youtube Music simply has no equalizer on any of its supported platforms.
Here, the clear victory: Spotify, not only for superior reproduction, but also for its native equalizer.
3. Compatibility
Many users use multiple platforms, so analyzing the compatibility of Spotify vs Youtube Music apps can be very useful for the player.
The newest of them, the service offered by Google, is very sinful in this area and fully supports only Android and iOS. In addition, it has its player that works in most of the best browsers, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera, thus running on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Already the competitor, Spotify, supports just about everything. The long list: Android, iOS, MacOS, Windows, Linux, browsers, any bluetooth speaker, most voice assistants, including everyone using Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa, all TVs with Android TV, Chromecast, Playstation, Xbox… finally, a list that doesn't end.
As you can see, there is no fair competition in that area. Spotify wins, giving no chance to Google's rival, so if you want to make sure you use your app on many devices, go with it.
4. Offline library and music
Another important factor in Spotify vs Youtube Music analysis is the size of its collection and in this area both are excellent. We also have tips on how to download free music on mobile and computer.
Let's start with Spotify: It offers more than 50 million songs and every day it adds more new things, and also offers early access to many albums, singles and songs. Allows you to not only download for offline access of up to 10,000 songs, but also access to all your music files you have on your device.
The Swedish competitor has never explicitly said how large his stock is, but certainly giant, no matter how good his rival. Now, if you add Youtube Premium to the plan, the amount of music you can play is almost unlimited, since you have access to fan covers and all that Youtube has available.
It also offers music downloads for offline playback, but it works in a very bizarre way, deleting and redoing downloads every day, without specific hours, which can result in you being in your car listening to music and the app deciding to do so, if you want. leaving no music if mobile network downloads have been disabled.
So Spotify wins in this category because it has much better features implemented, even though it has a smaller collection.
5. Interface and navigation
This is an area where Spotify vs Youtube Music offers very different things to the user, but without having a clear winner, as both interfaces are quite good.
Let's look at Spotify first: its very simple-to-use interface, with three tabs at the bottom of the screen, the initial, the search, and your library. It offers short videos accompanying certain songs and in several of them you can follow the lyrics or even see a little about the history of the music.
On Youtube Music you will also find three tabs at the bottom of the screen, the initial, the Hotlist and your library; the search is in a magnifying glass at the top of the screen, on all tabs. It offers lyrics for your music and you can also view the clips. The tab Hotlist lists the most listened songs of the moment so you never get left out.
Both applications offer a single theme, the dark, and both make good use of it, even though Spotify is more appealing to the eye. And remembering that if you like it you can learn here how to turn on the dark theme in various apps.
6. Discovery Tools
This is, without a doubt, one of the biggest advantages that the Spotify vs Youtube Music category of apps have over apps for listening to offline music, allowing you to meet many artists that without the help of these apps you would never know.
Following the pattern, in both apps on this list, the first time the user logs in, they ask them to select their favorite artists, to begin the process of refining suggestions for what they hear and improving them as they go.
The Swedish app offers two types of music discovery playlists, the “Weekly Findings”, which renews every Monday and is filled exclusively with news for the user and the Daily Mix, which renews daily, and composed of what you like along with news. In addition, on the home screen you can explore custom recommendations.
Already the Google app offers its own version of rival's playlists, the“Your Mixtape”, which works amazingly well, blending your favorite artists with app recommendations. The same recommendation from YouTube is the same, so if you like it, you will like it too.
Here is another draw; both of them are excellent, even if both fail sometimes. They learn quickly what the user likes and make excellent recommendations, regardless of their musical taste.
7. Radio
Unfortunately, this is a missing tool in both apps on this list. None of them offer real radios, like Deezer and Apple Music do, but only offer their auto-generated radios.
Radios work by basically playing music related to what the user was listening to. You can play a melody, an album, a playlist, an artist, whatever; When you finish what was on the playlist, the radio starts and shows you music, often the user doesn't know, but always great.
Here, therefore, we have another tie between Spotify vs Youtube Music.
8. Social Tools
Finally, we come to the last section of the Spotify vs Youtube Music comparison article, where we will evaluate their capabilities and social integrations.
Let's start with the Swedish competitor, which offers the most robust type tools. You can connect your Spotify account to your Facebook account, for example, to let your friends find you more easily, and see the music you like, so you can do the same.
In addition, the user can follow artists and other users of the app, whether friends or not, and offers the ability to create shared playlists where everyone with the link can add and remove songs.
Already Google's rival only has the ability to follow artists and create search playlists from other users, but without integration capabilities with any social network.
The victory of this part is clear and goes to Spotify, the only one of the two that really offers options in this regard.
Conclusion
In short, Spotify is considerably better than its rival in almost every category, with the only real drawback being that it does not offer the Youtube Premium combo plan that Youtube Music offers.
Other than that, the better interface, better sound quality, offers basically the same music collection, integrates with facebook and works with a much wider range of devices.
So what did you think of our comparison of Spotify vs Youtube Music?
We hope you enjoyed the article, got some benefit from it or even helped you make a better decision. Leave comments in which one you prefer, if you use any of them and remember to check out our previous two comparisons between Spotify vs Apple Music and Spotify vs Deezer.
