I am the definition of a “Google guy.” I have a Pixel in my pocket. My house is littered with Nest Audios. I pay for the 2TB Google One plan. I use Gemini for work. I even tolerate the fact that Google keeps killing off apps I love (RIP Google Podcasts, RIP Inbox). I am locked in. The ecosystem works for me. And technically, I have YouTube Music. It comes free with my YouTube Premium subscription. It is right there on my phone, installed by default, begging me to save $12 a month by cancelling Spotify.

But I can’t do it. Every six months, I try. I migrate my playlists. I force myself to use it for a week. And every time, I come running back to Spotify or Apple Music within 48 hours. It’s frustrating because on paper, YouTube Music should be the best service on Earth. It has the biggest catalog (remixes! live sets! covers!). It has the best search algorithm. But the user experience is a mess of contradictions, bad data, and features that feel like they were designed by a video engineer, not a music lover.

Here are the five dealbreakers that keep me paying for a competitor, even though Google is giving me their service for “free.”

1. The “Library Pollution” (Stop Mixing My Video Likes)

This is the original sin of YouTube Music, and despite years of complaints, it’s still broken in 2026. YouTube Music treats your “YouTube Brand Account” as one single entity. If I am on main YouTube and I “Like” a video of a guy playing a cover of Wonderwall on a kazoo because it was funny? Guess what shows up in my “Your Likes” playlist on YouTube Music next to Radiohead and Kendrick Lamar? The kazoo guy.

It sounds minor, but it ruins the trust I have in the shuffle button. I cannot just hit “Play My Likes” because my history is full of video essays, meme songs, and random ASMR tracks that I liked for video reasons, not audio reasons. Google added a toggle setting a while back to “Separate Likes,” but it’s inconsistent. It often breaks with older likes, or it doesn’t apply to “subscribed channels.” If I subscribe to a channel for their video content, their music uploads suddenly flood my artist list. I want a church and state separation. I want my music library to be a pristine sanctuary, not a dumping ground for every random video I’ve double-tapped since 2012.

2. The “User-Generated” Metadata Nightmare

One of YTM’s biggest selling points is that it has everything. If a song isn’t on Spotify, it’s definitely on YouTube because some kid uploaded a lyric video of it in 2011. That is a feature, but it’s also a bug. The search results are a chaotic mess of “Official Audio,” “Music Video,” “Lyric Video,” “Nightcore Remix,” and “10 Hour Loop.”

When I ask Google Assistant to “Play Hotel California,” I don’t know which version I’m going to get. Will I get the 2013 Remaster? Will I get the live version from 1994? Or will I get a version uploaded by xX_EaglesFan_99 that has a 30-second intro of him talking about his guitar? Spotify and Apple Music have strict metadata. An album is an album. A single is a single. YouTube Music feels like digging through a crate of bootleg tapes at a flea market. It’s messy. And when you are trying to build a high-quality library, seeing low-res album art from a user upload mixed in with official releases makes the whole app feel cheap.

3. The “Spotify Connect” Gap

If you have used Spotify Connect, you know it is witchcraft. You are playing music on your phone. You walk into the living room. You open the app on your TV or your laptop. It shows you exactly what is playing, and you can control it instantly. You can switch the audio output from headphones to the TV without a hiccup. It is seamless.

Google’s version is Chromecast (or Google Cast). It is… fine. But it is clunky. Casting takes a few seconds to connect. The volume controls often lag (you turn it down, nothing happens, you turn it down more, and suddenly it’s silent). But the worst part is the “session handoff.” If I am listening on my desktop browser and I pick up my phone, the phone has no idea what I’m listening to. The sessions are isolated. In 2026, ecosystem continuity is the name of the game. Apple has Handoff. Spotify has Connect. Google is still treating every device like an island. I shouldn’t have to “disconnect” from my computer to start listening on my phone.

4. The Bitrate (Where is the Hi-Fi?)

For the average listener, 256kbps AAC (which YouTube uses) is perfectly fine. But we are living in a world where Apple Music and Amazon Music offer Lossless and Spatial Audio for free. Spotify even finally rolled out their Hi-Fi tier. Google is the odd one out. They are still capping the quality. And even worse, because of the “User Generated” content issue I mentioned earlier, a lot of the tracks on YTM aren’t even 256kbps. They are old 128kbps uploads from a decade ago that have been normalized to sound loud.

If I am wearing $400 noise-canceling headphones, I can hear the difference. The cymbals sound wishy-washy. The bass lacks that tight punch. If I’m going to commit to a platform for the next five years, I want to know that I’m getting the best possible file quality. Google seems content with “good enough.”

5. The Desktop Experience (It’s Just a Website)

I work at a computer for 8 hours a day. My music player is my most-used desktop app. Spotify has a dedicated, native app. It’s snappy. It handles local files well. It has robust keyboard shortcuts. YouTube Music? It’s a PWA (Progressive Web App). It’s basically just a Google Chrome tab pretending to be an app. It feels sluggish. It doesn’t integrate well with media keys on some keyboards. If Chrome crashes, my music dies. It feels like an afterthought. Google is a trillion-dollar software company. The fact that they can’t build a dedicated, native music client for Windows and Mac is insulting. It screams, “We don’t really care about power users.”

I want to love it. I really do. The algorithmic radio is actually better than Spotify’s. The “Supermix” is genuinely great at guessing what I want to hear. But a music app is more than just an algorithm. It’s a utility. It needs to be organized. It needs to be high quality. It needs to work seamlessly across my devices. Right now, YouTube Music still feels like a feature of YouTube Video, rather than a standalone product. Until Google decides to treat music with the respect it deserves cleaning up the library, fixing the metadata, and giving us a real desktop app I’ll keep paying the competition. My loyalty to the Pixel ecosystem ends where my playlist begins.