YouTube Music’s search functions give it an edge over other music streaming apps.
Even though I am reluctant to support Google and YouTube in particular, due to their atrocious treatment of YouTubers, heavy-handed copyright enforcement system etc., I have to admit that YouTube Music has so far been the best streaming app for me for two simple reasons, both related to its search capabilities:
1) Non-Latin alphabet suppport
I am a Greek person, and listen to lots of Greek songs. Written in…Greek characters! Take a look at the screenshot above. I’ve searched for a song using the normal Greek alphabet and YouTube music has been able to correctly find it, as well as other versions like covers etc. Note that the song titles don’t necessarily have the Greek characters, but YouTube doesn’t care and is able to find the song I wanted. Let’s try the same search at Spotify:
Hmm, no luck with the Greek characters (left image). OK, let’s try it with Latin characters. That’s where we hit a snag. The word “Είσαι” can be transcribed as either “Eisai” or “Ise”, and that is the case with a lot of Greek words. As a result, Spotify has different results depending on the spelling (middle and right images)
Let me tell you now that due to non-standard transcription of Greek characters into Latin ones, this happens to, like, 95% of my searches, leading to a major frustration every time I want to search for something.
Also, note how YouTube music could include results for “Ise” and “Eisai” on the same search regardless of me typing it in Greek? YouTube knows what I mean, which brings me to my second point:
2) Far more forgiving search results
So for this I also decided to try Amazon Music, just in case it was any better than Spotify (it wasn’t). See, I wanted to search for a song called Bloody Something by Greek artist Monika. Problem is I thought the title was This Bloody Something, so that’s what I searched for. As you can see from the screenshots above, Spotify is totally unable to guess what I’m searching for (even when I click “See all songs” in the screenshot in the middle) but of course immediately finds it when I delete the word This. Amazon Music (left and middle screenshots below) also struggles if I have the word This included, and only gives me the correct result when I type the title exactly right. YouTube Music (bottom right) on the other hand, just handles it correctly, and gives me the expected results.
So, where does that leave us? Well, for me at least, YouTube Music is the only music streaming app that I can trust will easily surface the results I want with little to no issues, so one less thing to think about. Combined with the fact that it also includes user uploaded videos (from live performances, or songs that just haven’t been officially uploaded to the platform yet), it leads me to accept YouTube Music as a necessary evil in my life.
