YouTube Music Premium: Fees start here at $10 per month or $100 for an annual payment.

If you want to pay for a higher tier, you have a few choices to remove ads and add extra capabilities. They’re not as egregious as YouTube proper where ads can interrupt your music before every song if you skip around often enough, but they are present. The base tier of YouTube Music is free, but you will get some ads. If audio quality is your top concern when subscribing to a service, YouTube Music isn’t the best choice, but if you are interested in reliable streaming, it’s a very competitive option. YouTube Music does not offer the ability to listen to or download high-res audio files - that’s one area where features like Apple’s high-resolution audio options and Tidal and Amazon Music’s Hi-Fi tiers, among others, can go well beyond what YouTube Music is capable of.

Downloads for offline listening provide you with standard audio files. You can switch between these at any time by heading to the YouTube Music settings. High: This sets the bit rate at 256kbps AAC.Normal: This sets the bit rate at 128kbps AAC.

Low: This sets the bit rate at 48kbps AAC.These tiers also dictate how much audio will download onto your device and the size of those files: YouTube Music offers three different audio tiers that you can switch between depending on how much bandwidth you are comfortable taking up. To get those, you’ll need Google Podcasts. One thing to note is that YouTube Music does not include podcasts. Still, that’s a boatload of music and should suit most people just fine. At one point, that might have sounded impressive, but most of the major music streaming services now boast 100 million songs in their libraries, including Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Spotify, Qobuz, and Tidal. Music libraryĪs of April 26, 2023, YouTube Music officially has 100 million tracks available to stream or download. Left to its own devices, YouTube Music will continue playing past favorites that you’ve enjoyed. All this taps into your Google account information and history, so if you’ve already been using YouTube to listen to music for a while, you’ll find a lot of prompts to add your favorite musicians and build out a profile for recommendations (a step you can skip if you prefer).

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