
YouTube Will ‘Frustrate’ Some Users with Ads So They Pay for Music - drewg123
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/youtube-to-frustrate-some-users-with-ads-so-they-pay-for-music
======
aerotwelve
This is why I still maintain a digital music library -- backed by a physical
media collection that sits in my real live analog house -- that I sync to an
SD card in my phone.

In 2018, Bandcamp seems to have solved the digital music sales problem that
the iTunes music store never could (DRM-free album downloads in lossless
formats for less than the retail price of the CD or LP). Everything that isn't
there can usually be found on Amazon music in a lossy format for a decent
price w/ no DRM (sometimes free if you have Prime). If I have to rent music,
I'm doing it from Spotify.

Another half-baked Google service that they'll give up on in six months _plus_
an obnoxious marketing campaign fronted by an old Warner executive? They might
want to consider paying people to use it.

~~~
loudandskittish
Frankly, I'm moving back to vinyl. I'm aware that most albums have finally
been properly remastered to be in a digital format, eliminating the disparity
in sound quality, but I feel like something purely analog with zero
possibility of any DRM is more permanent, crazy as that may sound.

Plus, Bandcamp is nice. Artists I've discovered through there frequently have
a vinyl pressing available, which entitles me to download the lossless digital
version as well.

~~~
knaik94
Have you ever found vinyl sounding different from its CD equivalent due to the
equipment you play it on?

The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor (hearing
the amplified sound of the needle pushing the vinyl during supposed silence,
as well as random pops).

I am curious to know if that's seen as a feature and not a bug.

~~~
squarefoot
"Have you ever found vinyl sounding different from its CD equivalent due to
the equipment you play it on?"

Many CD are remastered if not remixed, so they aren't perfect equivalents of
the original vinyl; they usually also add compression to raise the perceived
average volume (sometimes beyond clipping!), which kills the original dynamics
and quality of the media. Some early CDs may have been direct conversion of
the master into digital form, but if we take an old record and the equivalent
CD issued recently, they're not the same thing anymore.

"The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor"

That's because of the needle friction and other interference by motor and
other mechanical parts etc. all noise which is getting amplified. They've made
miracles with pickups, RIAA preamps and other stuff, but we can't make a
mechanical device that doesn't generate friction otherwise we would have
invented perpetual motion. So yes, records are more noisy and have a much
smaller dynamic range, although most modern overcompressed music would falsely
suggest the opposite. A search for "loudness war" can bring some interesting
information.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war)

~~~
busterarm
You know that vinyls get a mixdown from a tape (open-reel) or DAT master also,
right?

Vinyl, like CD, has format limitations that need to be overcome. Most notably
with vinyl, bass has to be converted to mono and high frequency content needs
to be heavily EQ'd.

Vinyl isn't the "original" sound, and you should never mixdown a CD from a
vinyl source (since in most cases you have the original master or a tape copy
of it) unless you have absolutely no other choice.

~~~
squarefoot
Of course I know about limitations, I stopped using vinyl over 20 years ago.
The OP was wondering why vinyl and CD sound different and besides the obvious
media limitations I added that even a perfectly new record that doesn't
crackle will produce noise because of friction. I also pointed out that today
CDs don't come from the same master (1) used for vinyl. Sometimes they're also
remixed (2) then compressed and limited (sigh). This may suggest that modern
CD sound worse than vinyl while it should be the other way around, but greedy
producers force their engineers to ruin the sound to make music louder. FWIW,
I am one of hose Rush fans who stopped buying their CDs when Vapor Trails came
out. I don't even have the mp3s of that awful sounding crap:(

1\. stereo master tape, not the record press 2\. from the same multitrack tape
(often transferred onto digital) and sometimes with other audio added.

------
herpderperator
I have been paying for YouTube Red since 2015. I really like the YouTube Music
app and how I can save songs for offline use, and how it's kept up-to-date
with songs I like on YouTube (as well as recommended suggestions) whenever my
phone goes on WiFi, so my playlist never gets old. You also get other perks
like keeping a YouTube video playing in the background on your phone.

I prefer using YouTube for music as opposed to other services because I listen
to a lot of underground/developing artists who aren't as easily signed up to
go on the larger platforms like Spotify. For that reason I also like
Soundcloud, but I feel I find more relevance on YouTube.

Since I pay for YouTube Red, I don't get ads. I think the cost justifies it.
So, if you have so much of a problem with ads, you should really consider just
paying for it. It's a great service. Shouldn't you be paying for services you
appreciate?

~~~
imode
or, or, hear me out...

I could use adblock, a free and crowd-sourced adblocker, to... block the ads.

YouTube already makes copious amounts of money outside of advertising and Red
exclusivity. don't force that kind of an annoyance on people if you expect
them to A) use your service or B) not subvert the crap you put in front of
them.

there is no argument for ads anymore.

~~~
guelo
Youtube could make their ads unblockable by putting them in the content's
video stream or just serving them from the same domain. I feel like they don't
do that just as a way to be nice to adblockers, but I don't know why.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I'm pretty sure it would also be more expensive in terms of CPU and
potentially disk.

~~~
lloeki
The cost of concatenating two mp4† files is essentially zero. IIRC you can
even `cat foo.mp4 bar.mp4 > baz.mp4` and it's supposed to still be valid mp4
(there may be same-codec restrictions, but even resolution can change).

~~~
ptspts
The output of cat isn't valid MP4. The CPU cost of concatenating is small
though, it can be done on the fly. Even easier for MP4 streaming (DASH).

------
cornholio
> Cohen, who joined YouTube in 2016 after about 30 years in the record
> business, including stints as a road manager for Run-DMC and a senior
> executive at Warner Music Group.

I'm not sure he understands yet the culture of the organization he's in, and
the way most internet companies work. The fact that Youtube is king of the
hill does not mean he's sitting on a monopoly he can milk for revenue. On the
Internet, if you crap on your users you become history in 6 months time.

~~~
glogla
Not if you're the actual monopoly because of network effects.

See youtube, facebook, google, microsoft.

~~~
onion2k
_Not if you 're the actual monopoly because of network effects._

I'd have thought network effects are exactly why companies on the internet
_can 't_ mess around with their users. If a few people start using another
site and share it with their friends, the rest could all follow very quickly.

~~~
yoz-y
Youtube does have a big advantage of video being too large to move around
quickly. It would take quite some time to bootstrap a new video service with
even a remotely comparable catalog.

~~~
John_KZ
Not to mention 10 years worth of archived videos that will be lost (and are
currently lost due to censoring and de-ranking). Youtube at this point is like
the Library of Alexandria, but they just decided to burn down half the books
and replace the index with a list of their favorite ones. You can read books
for free, but they inject advertisements between paragraphs.

------
ocdtrekkie
This seems like one of those things corporations obviously do, but you'd be
hard pressed to believe someone would be dumb enough to openly state they do.
Now when you wonder if YouTube is actively trying to irritate you, you can
know that yes, that's _exactly_ what they're trying to do.

The YouTube team's behavior is getting a lot more annoying of late. The other
thing I can't get rid of is the popup suggesting I get YouTube Red every like
48-72 hours of my life.

~~~
FridgeSeal
There's an associated set of ads on the Play Music app as well.

Every couple of days there'll be an interstital/overlay/message about the paid
subscription option, it's incredibly annoying because it doesn't let you
dismiss it forever.

I've previously paid for Spotify and for Google Play Music, I've gone back to
buying my music (hooray Bandcamp) and don't stream any on my phone but get
subjected to all the ads anyway.

------
aq3cn
I came across iYTBP - injected YouTube Background Playback. It allows one to

1\. view 2k 60 fps videos in app

2\. background playback

3\. download for forever

4\. dark mode

5\. no advertisement ever

6\. VP9 codec

7\. loop playback

8\. pip mode

and much more without rooting your phone.

[https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-
iytb...](https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-iytbp-
injected-youtube-background-t3560900)

This app is also available by Youtube Vanced name in XDA app store for free.

Alternatively, just make the public playlist of videos you like to watch and
use youtube-dl cmd tool to download all those videos inside Android using
Termux app. I prefer this method over the earlier one.

~~~
huntie
NewPipe also supports most, if not all, of these features, and it's open
source.
[https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe](https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe)

~~~
arca_vorago
Newspipe is my yt client of choice on android. Otherwise mps-youtube.

------
reacweb
I am all the more disposed to tolerate a little more advertising on the
youtube site since youtube kindly tolerates download with youtube-dl
--extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxx](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxx)

~~~
gkya
you can also

    
    
      youtube-dl -o- URL | mpv -

------
chx
You know what frustrates me? I can't get YouTube Red because I am in Canada.
And then the coalation called Fairplay Canada have the audacity to ask the
government to censor the internet in order to stop piracy. No way in hell. We
will stop this.

------
callahanrts
It's totally reasonable to push people towards their music service and there's
nothing inherently wrong about doing it this way. However, it feels a little
strange to see a company weaponizing advertisements in their marketing
strategy.

------
raverbashing
> will “frustrate and seduce” users of YouTube’s free service

Oh look at Google once again thinking of alienating their users once more

------
austincheney
I use YouTube for background music while I program, but fortunately my wide
variety of instrumental music choices are not inundated with ads.

To me this indicates they are putting their muscle behind a certain flavor of
content representative of specific demographics inclined to spend money. If
YouTube tried to muscle me in this way I would just use Amazon Music instead.
I detest ads enough that I would alter my preferences, behavior, and content
choices to remain ad free.

To those of you who are subscribing to YouTube or watching copious amounts of
ads thank you for indirectly funding my entertainment.

~~~
Chirael
You may find this interesting, if you haven't heard of it before:
[http://musicforprogramming.net/](http://musicforprogramming.net/)

------
andrew-lucker
Has anyone else encountered the 25 minute ads? Mine was a full episode of some
home-improvement show sponsored by Lowes.

~~~
mitchty
I got one ad that was 10 minutes and couldn't be skipped. I said, yeah screw
that noise, copy/paste youtube-dl url

~~~
nkkollaw
Why don't you install an adblocker, which will block the ads for you?

~~~
mitchty
I have one, not everything gets blocked.

~~~
akerro
Make sure you have these rules enabled
[https://i.imgur.com/S9pCwIc.png](https://i.imgur.com/S9pCwIc.png)

This blocks all twitter/facebook/google/botnet widgets, other tracking
elements, all ads, even those on youtube. Highly increases your privacy and
browsing experience. I use these rules for so long I even forgot youtube has
ads.

~~~
ptspts
I use the latest uBlock Origin with the latest stable Google Chrome on Linux.
I have the block lists above
([https://i.imgur.com/S9pCwIc.png](https://i.imgur.com/S9pCwIc.png)) enabled,
and I'm still getting lots of ads on YouTube. Ads started appearing in 2018,
it was fine before.

Any advice how I can get rid of ads on YouTube?

------
nkkollaw
The other day I forgot to re-enable my ad blocker after testing a site, and
I'm amazed that anyone can even use YouTube without blocking the ads (let
alone enjoy it).

I literally have no idea why anyone would go through that to watch a 5-minute
video.

------
aunty_helen
I use youtube for music in the car on the way to work and during work hours
(which I have an adblocker for).

Two experiences I'd like to relate, In the car, music being interrupted more
often with annoying ads. Even more so in the last 3 months. Some ads even
asking me to take a survey in the youtube app. This annoys me and makes me
hate using youtube. Often will make me switch to using bandcamp (which I
purchase music on that I really like) or soundcloud.

Experience 2, when youtube brought out a new algo to pick the next song to
play. After stringing together ~10 bangers in a row, some that I haven't heard
recently / before, I actually looked into youtube red. Can't remember why I
didn't start a subscription.

I'm not opposed to paying for a service, I've had Spotify, Apple and Tidal
before. I know the Spotify annoying ads worked well for them. I'm not sure how
well it will work for youtube.

~~~
akuji1993
Depends how you define "worked for them". Spotify is still not working
profitable to this day.

~~~
pjc50
Since the music industry sets arbitary rates for Spotify, it _cannot_ be
profitable for any significant period of time - the rates will rise to make it
break-even again.

------
kristofferR
I hope this only happens for people in countries where paying for Youtube Red
is actually allowed.

It's fine on my computer thanks to adblocking, but using Youtube on iOS
devices and Chromecast is so damn annoying. It's absurd that they ban me from
paying to skip the ads.

------
Daycrawler
Is a business model built on people's ignorance of ad-blockers really
reliable?

~~~
amelius
Do ad-blockers now also block video-ads in youtube?

~~~
drngdds
Yeah, they've done that for a long time.

~~~
amelius
Why does youtube not detect/fight this? I mean they can easily delay serving
the real video until after the ad is shown.

------
redcap
I listen to Youtube fairly extensively while working, but don't get any ads
because I have an ad blocker.

I don't even get "you have an ad-blocker installed" warnings...

------
blackrock
I get around the ads by muting the sound. It neuters the ad and I just look
away for 30 seconds or however long the ad is. Consider it a temporary state
of zen.

------
Endy
Oh that's amusing to me, since I use uBlock and Disconnect and download things
with youtube-dl. I wonder how they'd work on 'frustrating' me. All I'd do is
add a userscript into Greasemonkey or uBlock to get past their nonsense and be
on my way again.

------
ggg9990
And Google probably knows every last thing about you so they can gauge your
willingness to pay (based on say your willingness to pay for other Google
services, the number of impulse purchases you make on Amazon, etc).

------
abawany
Can confirm. Was running a playlist on a Windows machine with Edge as a cheap
substitute for burn-in/stability testing. No dice: it would stop after every
song with a ad dialog that required clicking (for YT Red, or for Chrome).
Horrible experience generally - it wasn't clear if this torture was reserved
for Edge users or I was special that day. I switched to Vevo and it provided
the necessary hardware testing that I was seeking.

~~~
nkkollaw
Why not Spotify?

~~~
abawany
I should have considered it but I am not someone who streams live content so
just a static playlist of music videos was all I was looking for.

~~~
nkkollaw
Spotify is not live content. You have albums or playlists like YT, but it's
made for that and the experience is much better.

Also, you avoid doenloading video content when all you need is audio.

~~~
abawany
Actually, I was looking for video content. The idea was to take this machine
and stress its bits for a bit to see if it was stable.

------
Azeralthefallen
I would love to be able to pay and just block ads on YouTube forever.
Unfortunately a lot of the music i like listening to, just isn't available
anywhere aside from YouTube.

Even more frustrating is lately i am getting pop ups every 2-3 songs asking if
i am still watching. The solution to prevent this is to get YouTube red.
Unfortunately it isn't available where i live.

------
beedogs
I must be running just the right combination of adblockers because I swear
I've never once seen an advertisement on Youtube.

~~~
aiCeivi9
It is harder to avoid with smart TVs and other hardware with YT apps.

~~~
zrobotics
Isn't that the reason to avoid hardware you have no control over, though?
AFAIK, this isn't a problem if you're using a HTPC, or not using the app on
mobile. This isn't any different than complaining that you can't leave the
walled garden in iOS, it is the product working as intended. Which does have
some benefits (i.e. better security for iOS vs. android sideloaded apps), but
drawbacks as well.

------
sf2001
Couldn't one have said the same about those annoying self-plugging Spotify ads
on Spotify advertising Spotify premium? I haven't heard them lately, but they
were like 30 seconds of a recorded cricket chirping. It seems like a common
tactic. Youtube wants to lock in MRR.

------
azakai
Maybe I'm one of those users? I've been getting two ads before almost every
YouTube video for weeks now.

Even more annoyingly, the first ad still says, falsely, "your video will start
in .. seconds" or "you can skip in .. seconds".

------
znpy
YouTube/Google probably have so-detailed user profile (or maybe I should say
"dossier") that they probably know with a very high accuracy who is likely to
pay and who isn't.

------
toolslive
This feels like 'racketeering' no ?

------
paul7986
YouTube Red is solid as everyone uses Youtube to listen to music. THus it
knows and creates the best mix playlist especially if you listen to many, many
genres of music. Apple Music like Siri is stupid .. the playlist it creates
aren't based on all genres I listen to but only one.

Also Red integrates well with Google Home as you can tell home to wake you up
to whatever song and play whatever song.

No commercials is a bonus to all previous mentioned.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
YouTube Red is not available in all countries Apple Music is.

~~~
izacus
And Apple Music is not available on all devices YouTube Red is.

------
craftyguy
hooktube.com

(provides youtube content without the youtube crap)

------
tyingq
This isn't new, is it?

~~~
juststeve
free is dying

------
golem14
If true, would it be different than the NPR pledge drives, really ?

~~~
extradesgo
Yeah, it's a lot different.

NPR used to be publicly funded, much like the BBC in the UK. The idea was to
offer objective journalism for the strength of democracy. It has helped a lot
in the UK may have helped prevent the current disaster we now experience in
the US. When that public funding started being removed, NPR had to start
acting more like a private company, satisfying target demographics and seeking
seeking donor support.

So, NPR pledge drives are in large part them trying to maintain an objective
perspective. A feeble attempt, sure, but they are trying. Youtube is merely
maximizing profit.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
I'm no fan of YouTube, but to be fair to them, it's probably not so much about
maximizing profit as it is an effort to avoid the wrath of the RIAA.

~~~
jadedhacker
Not to be pedantic, but even if that's true, the RIAA is advocating for the
profit seeking motives of the labels it represents.

