Anyone Notice Performance Service Changes When Using YouTube Music with YouTube Premium and without?

I have been using YouTube Premium for many years now thanks to a great OzBargainer but we ran into trouble few months earlier which caused me to try YouTube without premium for a while to see how it is.

One thing I really liked was YouTube music using it at work every day. After leaving YouTube Premium I noticed that some songs don't buffer, or some features don't work like replay repeat song function. Obviously offline downloads shouldn't work on YouTube non premium accounts, but I noticed that just the general other non premium features start to suffer as if they have a tiered system of service for premium and non premium users.

Has anyone else noticed this with just simple music playing?

Like just now my song didn't automatically go to the next song in queue I have to manually interact with it to play next song. I'm thinking of going back to YouTube Premium now because of this annoyance but wondering if maybe just YouTube Music has started doing this in the past recent months or something.

Anyways Merry Christmas Eve!

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Comments

  • I don't use YT Music but use YT Premium at home and YT non-premium at work. I don't notice any difference in video loading times or anything.

    • Ah thanks for this anecdote that is interesting. I'm more specifically looking for youtube music experiences though but that's good to know youtube premium YouTube videos are not affected. So thank you for confirming this.

      • The way I see it, they wouldn't degrade the performance of the free tier because that's what potential customers typically use to gauge whether or not it's something they want to subscribe to. If the experience is poor, they wouldn't bother subscribing.

  • +1

    Has anyone else noticed this with just simple music playing?

    Yes 100%

    Same as you, after being YT Premium for years I couldn't justify the non-Turkey price, so I went down the adblock/Smart tube/Revanced/brave rabbit hole, and only have my google home speakers/screens left on YT Free plan. They are painful to work with now:
    - songs regularly pause and buffer for 5-10 seconds, at exactly 0:59 mark
    - every fourth song will pause at a random spot in the song, and requires manual intervention "do you want to continue playing this song? Yes / no" button to press to keep playing

    This is on top of the ads, lack of choosing own song etc that is well documented.

    I'm looking for an alternative for google home speakers. I have Amazon prime but Amazon music (via echo speakers) is pretty crap compared to Amazon Unlimited

    • +1

      Ah thanks for your anecdote and experience on this topic i thought I was going crazy but now I know for sure.

      So youtube is using dirty tactics to mess with users decisions.. Hmm i thought so.

      Thank you.

      Yes i have been trying Amazon music lately because youtube music is unreliable now I have to use youtube itself to play music.

      I might go back to making YouTube playlists to substitute YouTube music but creating a YouTube playlist just for this purpose has become tiresome.

      • So youtube is using dirty tactics to mess with users decisions.. Hmm i thought so.

        Have you confirmed this on different devices, browsers, or internet connections?

        There's the famous saying - the plural of anecdote is not data. If youtube were using dirty tactics, the user below would also be experiencing the problems you were having.

  • I also used to use Premium all the time on the PC whilst working. Since the Turkey dream died I have been using Standard through Brave browser and noticed no difference, and also get no ads

  • Yes, Youtube are sabotaging free users. It's a random A-B test, sometimes playlists will stop working and sometimes they work fine for free users.

    Premium users don't have the same issues, as far as I'm aware.

  • Just used Revanced. Problem solved.

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