Long time user of Google Play Music as well and I gotta say...while YouTube Music is slightly inferior (edit: to GPM), it's not even close to inferior enough to convince me to go back to Spotify.

Granted, it does look like Spotify finally fixed the thing that got me to leave in the first place (10K library limit) but there's nothing so bad about YTM that I'd bother to pick up and move again.

Depending on your point of view, YouTube Music is far inferior to Spotify. The key advantage to Spotify is that they have apps for all platforms and have a much better integration story than YouTube Music. For example, I can stream directly from the Spotify app on Android to my Sonos speakers, I can use a Spotify app on my Samsung TV, I can integrate Spotify on my Home Assistant server, and I can sync Spotify playlists to my Garmin watch for offline access. None of that is possible with YouTube Music.

Some of those things I can do (I can stream directly from the YTM app to many different devices in my house, I don't have any Sonos stuff though)

Some of it I never even thought of doing (no Home Assistant, Garmin watch)

Some of those things I explicitly do not want to do (my TV is hooked up to a Windows PC with wireless keyboard, using an app directly on the TV sounds like a strict downgrade in usability)

I'd say it's less of a "point of view" thing and more of a "how do you interact with computers and the IoT" thing

The biggest problem with the GPM -> YTM transition was that my kids were suddenly locked out of music (as Google didn't allow kids accounts to have YT and YTM fell under that). This was a serious problem and I don't understand why they let it happen.

Thankfully, I got an email not 5 minutes ago saying that kids can use YTM again. Remarkably good timing on that one.

Same. Ad-free YouTube is essential for me, and getting YouTube Music as part of the bundle is a nice bonus. I have the family plan but my kids are always bugging me to get a Spotify family plan instead. If I do ever cave and pay for Spotify, I'll have to keep the YouTube premium plan anyway since I can't go back to watching the obnoxious ads on YouTube.

Both Opera's built-in adblocker and uBlock Origin on other browsers takes care of most of this nicely for me.

That only works for desktop use, on mobile it's slightly more complicated. With Premium you can use the official app with your screen locked or the video minimised, and you can download videos for offline viewing. Some of those are available with third-party apps for Android.

However, a weird limitation i noticed recently with YouTube Premium - while traveling i had a local sim card, and while using it for data ( even when on wifi), YouTube earned me some Premium features won't work and i might see ads, and i couldn't watch videos with the screen locked/minimised. When i switch data to my regular card, in roaming ( again, regardless of wifi), both of those work.

But if you're gonna pirate content, I don't think paid music subscriptions are right for you either.

It's doing fairly well - the report says its the only service that grew last year. I loved that Google Play Music still had a trad aughts iTunes approach to things, but it was confusing and out of sync with the market. YouTube Music is pretty awesome IMHO.

I use the Vinegar extension for Safari which replaces the YouTube player for a simple HTML5 <video> tag and consequently removes the ads. Don't know if there's alternatives for other browsers, but worth looking into if this is all that's keeping you there.

Firefox with ublock origin extension also removes all ads from youtube.