Yeah, like many Google products, it's poorly and confusingly named. It's a separate app from YouTube, and basically just like Spotify.
The only connection to YouTube is you can also listen to songs that are only uploaded to YouTube, which is a nice touch if you want to listen to tiny/hobby musicians with like 50 fans, unofficial live recordings of popular artists, niche international songs not licensed for sale in the US so they end up on YouTube, etc.
But 99% of the time, you're just listening to the same high quality versions of songs that any other streaming service has.
I see. I wasn't aware of the non-subscription experience being so bad. Good to know, but yes the paid version definitely uses a song database comparable to any other streaming service.
