YouTube is effectively a Google Podcasts platform already.
Paying for YouTube Premium to avoid ads is some of the best money I spend each month. I wish I could do the same for Spotify podcast ads. I do pay for Spotify already to avoid ads in music, but I can't seem to avoid them for the Joe Rogan Experience.
Lots of podcasts do not exist on YouTube. There is no way to subscribe to feeds or auto-download episodes or any of the dozens of quality of life features that podcast users have been enjoying for over a decade.
I subscribe to YouTube Premium but to consider it a replacement to a proper podcasting app seems naive to me.
If you like things inshittified, then it seems like a great idea. Let's put big tech in between me and the things I want to consume, when there's no need, and let them begin to try to make money off of it and make everything worse!
You mean like introducing ever increasing ad loads and removing background playback to a premium tier to create “value” for subscriptions while simultaneously trying to resurrect cable television despite the Internet being a thing, for example?
I love how hard people will advocate for their YouTube subscriptions like it’s the best thing ever.
YouTube’s recent changes are so Hollywood entertainment exec-esque lately (hey you got to make earnings at all costs!), as they gradually enshitify the Internet’s most popular and important content type, and they can do pretty much whatever they want because, really, they are an effective monopoly for UGC video delivery.
People LOVE espousing their “ad free subscriptions” and rail about the cost of video infrastructure, because they probably don’t remember when copyright broke down and there was a glimmer of the lack of false scarcity digital delivery actually could have created. You can’t download a car.
Google and Comcast literally were the ones who killed off peer-to-peer and decentralized solutions and made sure no competitor emerged. Bram Cohen had it right, but freedom scared big tech and video killed the radio star.
But please tell me how awesome YouTube “ad free” accounts are. In the meantime, enjoy shorts!
I miss the free Internet and actual disruptive innovation so much.
Curiously, the reply to yours calling out all these "YT premium is great" replies as potential Google employees was flagged. Why? It's not an invalid assumption.
I err on the side of people have been so sick of YT's badgering that Premium truly feels like a great solution - despite that only being the case because of Google creating the problem in the first place.
“Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.”
Enshittification is becoming a big deal on YouTube. The set of topics that YouTubers need to walk on eggshells around in order to avoid being demonitized is getting out of control, and is becoming increasingly reminiscent of the sort of constant, normalized self-censorship that's accepted as the norm on the internet in China. And it's entirely driven by the whims of advertisers.
But, also, I feel like they've sort of got me as a captive audience right now because YouTube's the only video platform that has a sizable international creator base.
> Paying for YouTube Premium to avoid ads is some of the best money I spend each month.
It’s a ridiculous amount of money to spend to financially support Google’s exploitation of content creators and abusive “copyright” system, just so you can watch content they (a) already stream for free and (b) is already full of product placements, stealth marketing, sponsored segments, etc.
No way in hell I’m paying a huge premium for that.
I loved the idea of Youtube Premium at first, but I feel €15/month is exorbitant amount for what we're getting in return. Same for Facebook/Instagram which will have a similar cost starting from February.
> but I feel €15/month is exorbitant amount for what we're getting in return
I think it comes down to how often you use the platform. YouTube has been my primary media source for the last twelve years and ads are what paid for that. Now that I can pay $14 (USD) per month to give the people I watch a bit more, have no ads, downloads, and a few other nice little features, it was a no brainer for me. I have always gotten _way_ more mileage out of YouTube than HBO or Netflix.
But if you don't, then it's probably not worth it and having an advertisement will pay for it instead.
That seems high but I know pricing can vary significantly across countries. Is that somewhere in Europe for example? Or any government or Apple taxes included?
in the US, going through the official website, it shows $14 a month or $11.66 a month if paying for the upcoming year at once. Premium and Music are part of the same product here and I'm not sure if you can unbundle.
For comparison, Spotify Premium here looks to be $11/mo.
On one hand I wish they had an "occasional tech video" tier - maybe even the option for me to choose which creators get the credits.
At the same time I can't shake the feeling that Google just enshitified the experience so much, that now "it's logical" to take a sub to make it decent again.
I also left Spotify because of podcasts. I did not want to listen to podcasts, and they couldn't get that through their heads, shoving it down my throat, advertising it to me, even though I paid for an ad-free experience. Drove me crazy, so I left.
What did you switch to? I tried Tidal, loved the noticeably higher-quality audio, but there were two dealbreakers for me - no crossfade playback (for running) and no downloads to the desktop app (for travelling). I could just about have dealt with no downloads on the desktop app, but they actually removed the crossfade playback a while ago because, according to an official reply on their support forums "it didn't add to the customer experience", which to me seems like such a blatant lie to cover for something else like they found it difficult to do for some technical reason.
I switched to a combo: For myself, I'm back to a music library that I own. No DRM. For my wife, I signed up for Apple Music. She wants more variety than our library.
Thanks. I've been getting back into the Apple Music app a bit - I have a large library of CDs that I've digitised too, but I've discovered so much on Spotify over the years that I think I'd miss that side of it. I don't really have time to read music websites (and despite reading Melody Maker and NME quite a bit when I was younger) I find most of it overblown.
Like a sibling comment, I now also buy CDs and LPs of albums realeased in the pre-streaming era, depending on which format the album was made for. But I always immediately rip the CDs into FLAC because I'd forgotten how brittle they can be in terms of a slight scratch ruining one or more tracks.
And for more recent stuff that I really like, even if I hear it on Spotify, I try to buy it on Bandcamp or similar, so there's some cash going directly to the artist.
What all that doesn't solve for me is discovery, which I find is significantly better on Spotify than the Apple Music service. (Or the worse audio quality of Spotify compared to Tidal - my test album is always Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin. There's no hiding when it comes to the synth hi-hats at the beginning of Xtal.)
> Seriously considering just getting a record player so I can get rid of these middle men though. It's too much.
Do it! I started buying CDs again, and it's great. I get the best quality sound — we can argue about that another time ;) — all the music is _mine_, and after I convert it to FLAC for my walkman or iPhone (play via VLC) it's as convenient.
Companies have redefined advertising to exclude advertising for their own platform (and people will defend this for them and claim that "promotions aren't ads" or something like that).
At this point, we need a bill in Congress to establish that "ads are ads" and that "ad-free must be ad-free".
I came here to remind everyone that college radio streams are almost all ad-free and still a great means of music discovery.
Also many many many hobby/community radio stations streaming narrowcasts focused on your favorite obscure musical genre.
Radio.Garden is a fun place to behold the breadth and depth of what's available, right now, subscription free.
I wonder if that's a sign of things to come. Nowadays it's (in most cases) pay so you don't see ads, but in the future it will probably shift towards pay so you see fewer ads kind of model.
I mean Spotify already kind of does it with JRE. It doesn't feel right that he's got his own ads despite the very lucrative deal he got, and I'm still forced to listen to him drone on about yet another generic vpn service even though I'm paying for a subscription.
So glad someone said it. All these "just pay for YouTube Premium" comments make me sad. Killing all competition with effectively endless funding for your own thing, then charging for the only game in town should be illegal.
It's extremely expensive to store and distribute every video online. Plus, I use it like 10x a day. I dunno, that makes it worth it for me over Netflix which I use maybe once a week.
I pay for content too, just never to companies that drove all competition out of business with their bottomless war-chest, and only then started adding ads and asking for money. Fuck. Google.
If you don't like YouTube, you can watch TV instead, it's still there. Or read a book. "Extortion" – give me a break... Video creators choose YouTube because it gives them a chance to make an income from their videos, or at least an easy way to upload and host them.
This is why people should never be given anything for free, ungratefulness and entitlement is the only reward. I'll greatly enjoy when everything is behind a cheap paywall, giving creators their fair share and leaving penny pinchers in the dust.
Paying for YouTube Premium to avoid ads is some of the best money I spend each month. I wish I could do the same for Spotify podcast ads. I do pay for Spotify already to avoid ads in music, but I can't seem to avoid them for the Joe Rogan Experience.