I feel like youtube is losing sight of why users are paying for the service then.

To me, personally, youtube is useful enough that I will keep paying to remove ads entirely (in combination with ublock). That being said, there will come a time when the value proposition is no longer balanced. Then I will stop paying, and probably stop using it as well.

But as always with Google, I question whether their motive is to kill another service. They're very competent at that specific thing.

They just want users who are paying full freight as they know the ad business is in step decline.

Newpipe is all I have. I signed up for a couple creators patreon to support those I really like. Fuck Google. They are here for the investors bottom line not our shit. But people just want their shit and it perpetuates this behavior. My friend said he pays to support the creators he likes. He supports the giant corporation holding these creators ransom. Just send them money directly. Use new pipe or whatever. Quit supporting this shit and let the whole thing die until we realize there has to be a better way.

DVR is the equivalent of having a yt-dlp frontend that includes SponsorBlock.

Revanced, newpipe, grayjay, it's all I need thank you.

In the time it takes for a video to even show up, I can have a song playing with a playlist behind it. One video is the same amount of data as many songs.

My phone is my home internet and is often under 100KB/s, even at 240p YouTube takes way longer than YouTube music.

Before this change it was with ads for music content.

Moderately, it's still not as good as Play Music it replaced, and frankly the only reason I use it is because it comes with Premium (and Lite gets ads so fuck that deal), otherwise I'd subscribe to something else for music (aside from growing my album collection on Bandcamp).

Firefox + ublock origin + sponsorblock and I haven't seen an ad on youtube in all the years since I started that combo.

Youtube Music is pretty much just youtube with a different UI - the videos are the same. The audio quality is whatever's uploaded, so it'll vary a lot song to song.

I heard good things about play music but I was super pov when that existed and didn't pay for any online stuff, it was piracy or nothing.

Thats the exact same reason I have YouTube music.

Oh good, I’m not missing out then. I moved around quite a bit between Deezer, Tidal, random piracy in FLAC until finally landing on Apple Music.

Is it in decline? I mean, I want to believe it, but I haven’t seen any hard data on that.

This ain't reddit. You can freely name extension names here.

uBlock Origin

Oh I know, I’ve been here for years despite the age of my account. I just migrated from lemm.ee

I tend not to like to name these types of extensions because more exposure puts them at risk, and they’re super easy to find anyway.

Y’all pay for YouTube?

That was the reason to use Play Music when it was a thing. Upload all your torrented music and stream it for free.

There's one in the article comments. Talks about getting the material "dishonestly" and violating the TOS.

I've had no issues with adblocker for over half a year. Works flawlessly on both browser and mobile browser.

Problem solved! I don't need to think about this premium stuff any more. Recently, I've been playing with the idea of paying for premium, but that's no longer the case. Specifically, the family pack is the one that kinda made some limited sense in the past. I can see the kind of game Google is playing, and I'm not planning to participate.