YouTube Music app restructures paywalled features in Canada

YouTube Music in Canada will soon need a subscription to listen to music in the background and use CarPlay/Android Auto. To offset this, free users will now be able to enjoy fully on-demand music instead of shuffle only. These changes go into effect on July 8th, 2024.

YouTube is also tossing in its custom user-tailored playlists and the ‘Samples’ tab which isn’t a huge plus since it’s a weird TikTok-like scrolling video feed that only plays clips of songs. It is handy if you want to find a song or sound for a short video, but for music listening it’s not a huge addition.

All that said, while background play being disabled is a huge blow to free-tier users, I could see a world where unlimited on-demand makes up for it. Having access to more playlists and mixes is also something I expect free users to enjoy, but one of the joys of YouTube Music is the huge catalogue of user-generated playlists and songs so I’m not so sure having more YouTube-created playlists will be a big enough draw to offset the removal of background playback.

YouTube Music costs $10 per month in Canada, but if you jump up to $12 per month you also get YouTube Premium which removes ads from YouTube and allows you to use YouTube’s mobile picture-in-picture window or play videos while your screen is off. While I haven’t been a huge user of YouTube Music, in my experience it’s a serviceable music streamer and having access to songs that are uploaded as YouTube videos gets you a wider music collection than Apple Music and Spotify. That said, the main reason I still pay for it is because of how nice YouTube Premium is.