YouTube has become my main portal for listening to music, apparently by mutual agreement.
I still own a Sony Walkman MP3 player, holding thousands of songs in CD-quality FLAC format, alongside the CD themselves, but I mostly have only my phone while on the move, along with the headphones that connect only to that phone. I also still subscribe to YouTube Premium which, in addition to removing advertising from around all videos, allows uninterrupted listening while my phone is in my pocket. For someone who once said that music is their drug of choice, this is a beneficial arrangement: Google gets my money, and I get unlimited music in good enough quality against the outside noise.
YouTube’s 2024 Recap pegged my listening habits as “The Time Traveller”: “my listening traversed the decades, melodically exploring eras all year long”. The words “lively”, “giddy”, “hopeful” and “rock” were given as overall descriptors. Musical moods were classified, in descending order, as upbeat, uplifting, happy, fun and energising. I was also in the top 0.1 per cent of listeners to Sir Elton John, with Madonna, XTC’s psychedelic pastiche project The Dukes of Stratosphear, and Tears for Fears not far behind. I found myself taking pride in what the data proved and affirmed.
Despite a separate YouTube Music app has been available since 2015, I only use the main app to listen to songs like they were regular videos. Non-music videos are also mostly watched via my television, where I also only get recommended videos based on my subscriptions list, once I blocked several news channels first. This has created, for the YouTube app on my phone at least, an algorithm trained only to recommend music to me – looking at the main page of the app on Friday 4th July 2025 recommended songs to which I had previously listened, songs like them, songs used in other videos I had been watching while using YouTube on my television, or songs I haven’t listened to in a while. The only deviations from this are a strap of the top news stories, from the channels remaining unblocked, and a video titled “Analog[ue] tricks that make a song great”, in case I want to try it myself.
The YouTube algorithm has been so useful to me that the music recommendations it had made has become articles here: “Breaking Down Barriers”, Sir Elton John’s opener from his album “The Fox”, came from recommending the videos made for that album, while a link to his buried psychedelic album “Regimental Sergeant Zippo” alerted me to its existence. My love of the Japanese synth pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) was triggered by one track, “Rydeen”, being used as the background to a video of computer-generated animation. I may have heard “Take Me Home”, from Phil Collins’ enormously successful album “No Jacket Required” on the radio first, but listening to it on YouTube led me the ultra-infectious songs “Only You Know and I Know” and “Who Said I Could”.
I haven’t created a single music playlist in all the years I have used YouTube, only using the generic “Favourites” playlist, where songs sit among regular videos. I find myself sometimes going along with the mixes generated automatically by YouTube if I see songs I want to hear, but I most often make last-second decisions on what to hear next, sometimes acting upon the app’s suggestions. A recent lunchtime at work ran as follows: “Injected with a Poison” by Praga Khan (heard on the radio), “Break Out” by Swing Out Sister (YouTube suggestion), “Fire Brigade” by The Move (suggestion, heard previously), and “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News (suggestion, heard previously).
In all these cases, it was down to personal discretion as to which versions of the songs I heard. From searching artist and song names, do I then hear the official upload made fifteen years ago, or the alternative from an unknown channel from only three years ago? Sometimes, you must wade through numerous uploads to find the official one or settle before you get there. Age of video aside, the highest quality of sound available on YouTube, 256 kbps in AAC format, is equal to an iTunes download, and while I have gone on to buy a CD release to have the better quality, like “No Jacket Required” and “Regimental Sergeant Zippo”, there are many cases where I am not there yet.
What I am finding myself increasingly doing is using YouTube for music at home as a shortcut over my Walkman – if everything is there, why go to my own library? If the quality is good enough for right now, why delay satisfaction until you get the best quality sound?
The recommendations themselves may also be of concern. I was recommended Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of “Fanfare for the Common Man” – the single edit, thankfully – but follows other recommendations from the 1970s and 80s: ELO, Swing Out Sister, Matt Bianco, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, ABBA. The Carpenters, the theme to the BBC drama series “Howard’s Way”... Have I created a greatest hits radio station in my phone without realising, and should I consider it a problem?
This is why I always listen to the radio in addition to YouTube – you need to have someone share something new with you, because they won’t know what you have and haven’t heard.