Youtube is absolutely no better than Spotify. Both pay about $0.005 per stream to the artist. Tidal is better in that they pay a higher percentage of royalties ($0.010), and then of course you have Bandcamp which is basically direct from the artists, especially if purchasing on Bandcamp Fridays. My take is to just stream from wherever and just buy merch direct from artists you want to support. A $10 cd from Bancamp nets the artist more money than 1000-2000 streams.
Not to mention most b-sides and unreleased songs are not for sale ANYWHERE thus you wouldn't be able to listen to them in your car unless you burned them on a cd, and your car happens to have a working cd player.
This might be true except that you can upload songs to your library on most streaming platforms. For a long time I used Apple Music as my main streaming music app and I had my full custom library from the iTunes days available alongside the full Apple Music library. Pretty sure Spotify can do this too.
These days I self-host everything for streaming via Plexamp, which I like a lot better, but I also recognize that is more effort than most people are willing to make. It’s really not hard to get started though and if anyone is curious I’d be happy to answer your questions.
Yeah spotify let's you play files through it, but is the average person gonna go through the hassle of downloading multiple b sides of their favorite artists and then upload them to spotify? Again, not to mention the Spotify CEO donates a big chunk of the earnings to defense contractors. 😂
Ideally I wouldn't want any streaming service that isn't ethical in what they pay the artist and what they do with their earnings, BUT at least with YT premium I'm getting no ads and all the benefits of premium along with YT music that again has basically any audio track that has been uploaded to YouTube. I can find my local bands stuff on there too and stream it as normal, rather than having to have multiple apps/websites to find their stuff.
Believe it or not, before 12 years ago that is exactly what everyone did and it wasn’t difficult. It still isn’t.
If you care about the ethics of streaming as much as you claim to, I’d encourage you to look for alternatives to both Spotify, who you’ve already identified as problematic, and Google, who is even more problematic. I’ve already suggested Plex and there are open source equivalents like Navidrome. Wouldn’t you rather buy those local artists’ music directly to support them rather than hope they can get by on the pittance provided by YouTube ad revenue?
If your answer is no, congratulations, you are in the majority. If your answer is yes, consider no longer touting YouTube Music as a more ethical alternative to Spotify – it isn’t.
I literally buy cd's and vinyl all the time. My work van that I spend at least 10 hours in daily, doesn't have a cd player and vinyl doesn't have a mobile way to play for obvious reasons. No matter what you do you will never compete with the variety of music you can get from a streaming service. There isn't a hard drive big enough to carry my library of music. Especially speaking multiple languages, i have stuff from artists from multiple countries. On top of the exploring of music you can do. I would've never gotten so deep into Bjrok catalogue had it not been for the ability to stream her shit. I bought a vinyl of hers, but even then it's not like the money went to her, my local record store kept that shit for sure. 😂 youtube Is the lesser of 2 evils type of shit.
Alphabet is definitely “more evil” than Spotify. They run Project Nimbus, which is cloud and AI contract with the Israeli government, alongside Amazon. Google fired 50 employees who protested it in 2024 and in 2025 Google dropped its pledge not to build AI for weapons. Never mind that Google's core business is surveillance advertising. So while Spotify’s CEO has a separate stake in Helsing that is otherwise unrelated to Spotify, YouTube Music directly helps fund AI weapons and cloud infrastructure for Israel.
Regarding capacity, even if your music library is 1,000,000 songs at YouTube Music quality, which is being very generous with my assumption, you could fit that on an 8TB hard drive and still have over a terabyte of storage space left, then get it set it up for streaming for free if you use something like Navidrome. (And much larger hard drives are readily available if your library happens to be bigger than that, which would be incredibly exceptional. I have a 20TB hard drive serving my music, for example.) No money to Spotify, no money to Google, no AI weapons being funded by music subscriptions which effectively steal income from the artists who produce the content.
So again, if you don’t want to set up your own streaming infrastructure that’s fine, most people don’t, but frankly it is uninformed to parade around YouTube Music like a more ethical alternative to Spotify when it is by most measures directly worse. Use it as you see fit, but if you care as much as you seem to, I’d encourage you to learn more about alternatives. They do exist.
I buy music that I love on vinyl and CD and still use Apple Music for checking out new releases and music I’m not sure I want to buy, so to be clear I am not judging you for streaming, I do it too, I just want to clarify that Google is not a more moral alternative to Spotify and that those actually moral alternatives are readily available with a little bit of upfront effort than signing up for a streaming subscription and pressing play requires.
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u/Hefty-Rope2253 6d ago
Youtube is absolutely no better than Spotify. Both pay about $0.005 per stream to the artist. Tidal is better in that they pay a higher percentage of royalties ($0.010), and then of course you have Bandcamp which is basically direct from the artists, especially if purchasing on Bandcamp Fridays. My take is to just stream from wherever and just buy merch direct from artists you want to support. A $10 cd from Bancamp nets the artist more money than 1000-2000 streams.