I ditched Chromecast recently. They made YouTube too heavyweight for the Chromecast Ultra, to the point it regularly crashed. The new "Chromecast With Android TV" is barely more specs and has broken the interface by being... Android TV. Rather than take a well deserved second place, they chased Apple's design and ruined their niche.

Worse still, the best replacement I could find... Was Apple TV. So now I'm on that ecosystem.

YT Music is a dollar cheaper than Spotify, and generally better; it's also included in YT Premium, so if you already have that, 'may as well'.

In terms of subscribers or actual use?

I have YT Premium, so I automatically get YT Music. I would much rather pay less and drop the Music app. I almost never use it and don’t like it. I can’t justify buying for another service on top of this, so I went back to managing a local library and manually syncing all my music to my phone like it’s 2007.

A side effect of YouTube treating music special is that I can’t read comments on the TV for videos that it thinks are music. I find this very annoying. The same video will have comment on mobile or the computer.

Went to a wedding, 10 years ago even, and the "kids" DJ-ing the wedding party were pulling up music on YouTube.

(To be sure, this was very much a low-key affair, teens there with their parents were "DJ-ing" — but I was still surprised that is was YT. Just vanilla YT, pulling up "videos" and hitting "play".)

I dont believe that is the case, and I cant any reference to it. Nearly all are pointing to Spotify as number one both in terms of revenue and market shares.

The thing I dislike about Youtube Music is how it is basically not a product the team have put any thoughts into it. It is constantly rated one of the worst in Apple Music and Spotify comparison. It has so much potential but it is just very poor done.

Ultimately, we need to convince DC to start enforcing monopoly laws again.