YouTube Music Is Changing My Listening Habits… For the Worse

I don’t know if you know, but YouTube’s music app is almost a year old.  The idea sounds like an awkward cash grab for yet another music app at first blush.  But in retrospect, it’s an obvious peanut butter/chocolate combination.  Because YouTube was already a music app.  I mean, if you search YouTube for a random song, you’re more likely to find it than finding a needle in a needle stack.

It could be anywhere!

I’m not going to tell you how you should use Spotify, but if you aren’t searching for and listening to whole albums you’re doing it wrong.  Admittedly, there’s more chaff on Youtube, but that adds charm.  Look up Mike & the Mechanics song Silent Running, and you get exposed to the sweet trailer for an 80s dystopian political thriller which pretends to be a music video (If Hollywood is so intent on remaking movies, why can’t we remake a movie that never was?)

Silent Running the Motion Picture? I’ll be there at the midnight release with $15 in hand. Wait a second… there’s a 1972 movie called Silent Running that Rutheford named his song in tribute to? Time to take a writing break…

Look up Jane’s Addiction and you’ll find the documentary Soul Kiss.  Look up Bombs Over Baghdad, and you get RapCritic’s attempt to deconstruct the song’s meaning (which, to be honest, I think RapCritic might have missed the point.  Sure, André 3000 might have said that he stole the phrase ‘Bombs Over Baghdad’ from a CNN news reporter because it sounded cool.  But that reporter was talking about Operation Desert Fox, the 1998 Clinton administration’s four day bombing raid of Baghdad military and security installations because of Iraq’s non-compliance with the United Nations Special Commission.  When André sings, “Don’t pull that thang out, unless you plan to bang!” He’s saying that you shouldn’t bring out the big guns unless you’re planning on going to war.  That seems like a reasonable enough connection to me, even if André later forgot what he was talking about.)

I mean, it’s rather obvious that Andre is making an appeal to our government leaders that force as a means to an ends, even without the possibility of retaliation, will still destabilize a region, causing terrorist activity to spike and likely result in a military quagmire. Or B.O.B. is a song comparing Andre to a silver-backed orangutan. Either way, really.

YouTube was already being used as a music app for many reasons (it’s free, it’s available, it’s convenient to use one system to subscribe to both musicians as well as other content providers, etc.) So in this app happy world, YouTube made a putty to fit a niche.  And sure, you can be an incredibly boring person and use the app to only search for individual songs, Poindexter.  But the rest of us cool kids will be using YT Music for station mode:  Continuous streaming music either based on a mix of your personal interests, or a particular genre.  You know, like how Pandora works, the Radio Mode on Spotify, or your legion of tireless disc jockey man servants.

No, no, no! I already disliked this song! Do that again and it’s back in the box for the lot of you!

Unlike Pandora however, if you’re a faithful user of YouTube you’ll find a personal station already filled with songs you like, waiting for you to press play.  That’s because you thumbed up a number of songs over the years (and even if you refused to vote on music, YouTube tracks what you listen to as long as you’re logged in.) YouTube puts that input in a big mixing bowl, bakes it at 350 degrees, and pops a fluffy customized channel out of the oven for you to take a big bite out of.  It’s spooky.  When I pressed play I was assaulted by the past five years of forgotten casual positive responses.  Non-Stop from the Hamilton musical?  I love that song!  Frontier Psychiatrist by the Avalanches?  When did I take the time to give you credit?  Johnny Masacre’s Ultrasound!  I completely forgot about you!

My first experience with YouTube Music was a trip down memory lane.  My second experience?  Not so much.  The problem with using YouTube feedback to create my station is that I thumbed up a lot of unique projects that were interesting and fun in the moment.  Gimmick songs.  Listening to a groundhog puppet sing Shaolin Monk set to the tune of Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk is only fun for a couple go-rounds (surprisingly.)  Yet YouTube Music is stuck working with my fifty or so ‘likes’, spread among maybe twenty artists.  I’m bound for the mystic land of Drudgidoo, where every adventure is an overlap, and every day routine.

The good news is that YouTube Music knows that building a killer radio station requires branching out and exposing me to artists I’ve yet to log opinions about.  The bad news is that, unlike Pandora which uses a single artist and their musical style to base a station around, YouTube formed a station for me around goofy rap battles, 8-bit video game techno, and pop songs set to ragtime.  And while I normally enjoy this stuff, I wouldn’t want to take a cross-country road trip with nothing but novelty songs to noodle through.

That’s okay.  It means I must work harder at training my station to understand what I like.  It could be worth the extra work up front.  YouTube, after all, hosts the most extensive music library on the internet?  Can you get Lady Gaga’s tribute to David Bowie at the 2016 Grammys on Spotify?  How about ‘Radioactive in the Dark‘, an Imagine Dragons/Fall Out Boy mashup by AirGirlPhantom.  Think you can Pandora that?  How about an auto-tuned Joe Biden v. Sean Hannity rap off on Songify the News #7 – Naked Men, crafted by the Gregory Brothers and featuring Blondie.  Where else can you watch Naked Men?  Don’t answer that.

Even if YT Music can’t figure out what I want, I know it’s powered by Google.  And Google hosts the most powerful search algorithm in the world.  If Big G can figure out what ads I prefer to look at, it can guess what music I like.  If YT is finding it difficult to create a station for me, it isn’t the algorithm that’s the problem.  It’s the flawed information I fed into it that needs correcting.

But that’s the problem.  I can’t correct YouTube.  At least not without being a little bitch.

This problem stems from the very system YouTube Music uses to determine my tastes.  To correct YT, I need to thumb content down.  A lot of content.  For comparison sake, I’d guess that in Pandora I vote 85% of the songs down, and only 15% up.

In the abstract, I know this doesn’t seem worth worrying over.  YT Music doesn’t know what I like, so they throw Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know at me.  Probably a safe choice for most people using YouTube, except who isn’t sick of that song?  So I thumb it down.  The video was already watched 805 million times; Gotye can take the hit.  I’m not even sure why I bothered linking to it.  But later on, YouTube decided to show me Walk the Earth’s cover of the same song.  Now I got me some problem, because I genuinely like this version.  Not because the song and its cover sound different.  No, it’s because in WtE’s version, the five members are huddled around a single guitar.  And they all play it.  All five band member simultaneously play one musical instrument.  They sound like a full band is backing them up.  It’s equal parts crazy and inspiring, and impossible not to like.

I don’t want to listen to it every time I turn the player on, because again, that song.  But how do I thumb down this cover? It isn’t fair.  And that’s my reaction to thumbing down a band who is relatively well recognized for being OK GO lite.  What happens when Chop Chop (a song about GoldenEye 007 and avoiding confrontation) overplays?  I don’t even want to remove the ‘like’ from Molly Lewis’ goofy ukulele songs, never mind unlike them.

Okay, okay.  Maybe I need to accept that one down vote won’t make Molly, or any other professional on YouTube cry.  It don’t feel right. But I must adjust my perception of the thumbs up/down button.  Nobody gets to look through my dislike list (including me, evidently,) and my personal dislikes don’t impact the system.  Still… I like to think that when I vote I represent a segment of the population that thinks like me.  And if all the people who think like me are presented with a new like/dislike paradigm… I’m not sure what I’d want them to do as a voting block, but I’m pretty sure disliking my favorite artists isn’t it.

But… but I don’t want to kill him. Maybe we can make him my sword caddy or something? Anybody?

Oh, and while we’re ragging on YT Music, let’s talk about what happens when you minimize the screen on your phone.  Nothing.  Or to be more precise, everything pauses. No music for you.  No, you can not check your e-mail, or look at Facebook, or play a game, or anything anything while the music plays.  YT Music is a bigger attention hog than Miley Cyrus after someone in a party says to her, “I’m guessing you don’t know how to twerk.”

This isn’t an oversight that will be corrected in the future.  One of the ‘features’ in YouTube’s pay service, YouTube Red, is the ability to let YouTube stream in the background.  The company is choosing to annoy hundreds of millions of people who downloaded the app.  While some of this is an attempt to convert users to YouTube Red, I’m guessing this has more to do with forcing people to watch the ads that run on their phone, instead of letting them check their e-mail during content breaks.  It’s a rude policy, but it makes sense if your business is driven by clicks. YT’s entire model is centered on advertisement, and it can’t afford to let its customer’s wander when they aren’t watching cats leap away from cucumbers.  The policy makes sense for YouTube proper.  But most people using YT Music are only interested in streaming content in the background.

And speaking of adverts: there are far, far too many.  If we presume the average YouTube video lasts for eight and a half minutes (The true average length of a YT video appears to be unknown.  I got my number by logging out, going to YouTube’s main page, and averaging the top twenty videos recommended.) then three advertisements per half hour is fine.  But even when watching a string of two minute videos on YouTube, it’s no big deal to watch the first ten seconds of an advertisement and click a button to bypass the rest.  You don’t use YT Music that way, though.  Since you can’t use your phone while the video plays, you’re probably listening while doing house chores, or driving your car, or working on a laptop with the music playing in the background.  That means your hands and eyes are busy, so you won’t click a button to bypass the rest of the ad, which can sometimes run for four minutes.  On average, three minute songs will be interspersed with one minute worth of advertising.  That’s far too much work for not enough play.  I don’t even eat pistachios because I’m too impatient to get to the nut inside.

Look, I know I’m sounding like a Negative Nancy over here.  And no, that isn’t 100% fair.  YouTube Music is a good idea (“Let’s make a YouTube app that runs on continuos play, but only plays videos tagged as ‘music’.”) I love good ideas.  And I love minimal design.  There’s a lot of potential, and I wouldn’t have spent 2,000 plus words writing about it if I wasn’t already sold on concept.  But YouTube music wasn’t a clever idea.  It was tossed together because someone looking at a chart realized it was easy to do.  No one sitting in a board room asked the question “Who are we making this product for?”  If they did, they’d realize they needed to make three big changes to make the app great:

1. There needs to be one more button next to ‘like’ and ‘dislike’.  Something akin to “Don’t put this song on rotation.”  That’s been a feature in Pandora for years (if you press the down arrow between the thumb up and thumb down, one of the options is ‘I’m tired of this track’.)  The feature doesn’t need to be in YouTube proper. It can just be a third option for those who stream music.  Because whether or not I’m able to get over my personal issues with downvoting something I like, many more listeners will refuse to cross that line.
2. Let people play their music in the background.  I mean, seriously.  We aren’t looking at the screen anyway.  When I minimize YT Music to do something else and YT pauses, I just turn it off (and maybe turn on Groove.)  I assume that’s what everyone else ends up doing.  You can’t advertise to me if you’re app isn’t running.
3. Reduce the length of the ads.  YT needs to make its money, sure. But as I’m typing this article, a four minute Gears of War advertisement is playing on my phone.  Before that was a song, and before that was a two and a half minute Tide commercial.  In the past nine minutes, 70% of my time was spent listening to commercials.  That is beyond reasonable.

If YouTube compromises on these things, then it can be a killer tool.  Right now, it’s a tool that kills whatever audience it was intended for.  It’s begging for competition from an app that streams content from its website to provide a better service.  One that uses an ad blocker, I presume.