Of all the paywalled services out there, YouTube Premium is the one that I’ve never thought twice about signing up to. After all, I’ve been pretty fine just using its free version — but that changed a few weeks back.
After toying around with the idea and pushing it back on countless occasions, I gave into my temptations and signed up to YouTube Premium’s 1-month free trial. I’ve never quite understood why anyone would sign up to it, for me the price hikes and restrictions on extremely basic features haven’t sold me. Oh how I’ve totally changed my tune.
Over the course of my free trial, I used YouTube Premium more than Netflix, Disney+, and the slew of our best streaming services combined. If anything, it’s as if none of them existed in the first place — here’s what I thought.
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Welcome back, MTV
There’s nothing quite like opening YouTube, tapping on a video, and not having to sit through a jarring ad. Until you sign up for YouTube Premium, you’ll never fully understand how many ads are forced upon you per video, and going back to YouTube’s free version only proves that the number is growing. In retrospect, it’s one of the best parts of the experience, and it makes the music video viewing experience even better.
Though I’ve been a Spotify subscriber for over 10 years, I’ve been vocal on how its music video interface is simply no match to how smooth YouTube’s is. Take away the ads, and it’s like MTV has been resurrected. Besides, it’s a nice change to throw on a personalized Mix of fun music videos instead of a Spotify playlist, especially when you have friends over. Then an idea sprung to mind; what if I created my own playlists to mimic the nostalgia of music channels?
Until I signed up to Premium, I’ve never felt encouraged to make my own playlists in YouTube’s free version. Even though playlist-making isn’t a paywalled feature, you still have to sit through ads when watching the videos. So with that in mind, I used my free trial wisely to experiment with playlist making, and naturally, I created one that screamed ‘00s music channel’.
This took some time to get used to I won’t lie — only because I’ve been accustomed to Spotify and Apple Music’s way of things — but once I got the ball rolling, I was unstoppable. What was very helpful was YouTube’s playlist recommendation tools which, similar to the best music streaming services, sits at the bottom of each playlist giving you a quick and stress-free way of building your playlist with related videos.
It’s safe to say that streaming music videos ad-free and building playlists was one of my favorite parts of the experience, and even my pre-generated Mixes of familiar and suggested videos gave me just as much of a buzz. However, while returning to YouTube Premium isn’t totally off the table for me, I can’t ignore its awkward queuing system.
YouTube, fix your queuing system
I admit, this is a very small setback, but if you’re a chronic video queuer like me you’ll notice the finer details. But the wildest part is that queuing is a paywalled tool, and I don’t believe I’m getting my money’s worth.
There are two options for queuing videos, ‘Play next in queue’ and ‘Play last in queue’. But what I had the biggest issue with is that YouTube doesn’t separate your queued content from ‘Continue Playing’ content like music streaming does (see Apple Music as an example).
Instead of grouping your queued videos in a separate list at the top like Apple Music, it integrates them in the list of ‘Continue Playing’ videos. It’s a bit of a headache because you can only choose to play a video immediately, or plonk it on the very end of a lengthy list of recommendations, sandwiching your queued videos on either side.
This means you have to manually reorder the queue so that the videos you want to play next come first. Though the ‘Play next in queue’ button effectively does this, every time you select this option for a new video it overrides the previous video you chose to ‘Play next’, pushing it further down the line. It’s not ideal when you’ve got YouTube playing at a social gathering and all your friends get vexed when the video you queued for them an hour ago has yet to be played.
I could be reading far too deep into this, but it’s one of the downsides to my YouTube Premium experience that I can’t shake off. However YouTube is always making changes to the Premium experience, and I hope it hasn’t forgotten about its queuing system’s much-needed TLC.
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