I Finally Canceled My Spotify Subscription — Here’s Why I Switched to YouTube Music

My heart ached every month when I saw my credit card debited with $11.99 for Spotify Premium in addition to $13.99 for YouTube Premium (which includes YouTube Music). The math was simple, yet somehow I’d been ignoring it for years.

To me, audio has always been a subset of video. So, as a consumer, I never understood why I had to pay for two subscriptions to enjoy both audio and video content. 

Nevertheless, I was a loyal Spotify subscriber for more than three years, caught in the familiar trap of subscription inertia.

So why did I keep paying time and again for both Spotify and YouTube Premium? 

Well, like most people, I started with Spotify and had built my entire musical identity there – all of my carefully curated playlists, liked songs, and podcasts lived in Spotify’s ecosystem. Starting from scratch on a new platform seemed like navigating a mountain of friction.

The thought of losing years of musical discovery and organization was paralyzing. We’ve all been there – that moment when you realize you’re paying for redundant services but the switching cost feels too high.

The Migration Solution That Changed Everything

Last weekend, I started using Cursor and vibe coding to build a tool to make this one-time migration easier. 

During the process, I discovered that others have attempted this migration too – like this determined Redditor, and several paid products such as TuneMyMusic and Soundiiz that specialize in playlist transfers.

What surprised me most was that no one at YouTube has considered making this tool themselves. Even though OS migration tools such as Android to iOS (or vice versa) are considered imperative for a great user migration experience by both Google and Apple, apparently there are no seamless, first-party tools available to make music service migration easier.

The Bigger Picture: A Massive Market Opportunity

Now, I’m a big YouTube fan. I get everything from news to movies on YouTube, so the transition made logical sense for me. However, I can imagine there are other users who are more inclined to other services – say Apple Music for iOS users, or Audible and Amazon Prime subscribers who would want to consolidate their spending through their already existing subscriptions and migrate to Amazon Music.

From a product perspective, we’ve seen this consolidation play out before. Microsoft eventually focused on Teams and it quickly grew to become larger than the standalone player Slack, which was later acquired by Salesforce. The bundling advantage is real and powerful.

Spotify has 270 million paid subscribers up for grabs that would likely have the same question in mind: why am I paying for a standalone music subscription when it should already be part of a bigger bundle I get from one of these big tech firms?

As far as I know, none of these companies have built an easy, frictionless tool to make migration easier to their own platforms. I bet this would be the biggest product launch that could move significant numbers of users to YouTube Music, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. The first company to nail this migration experience will likely capture a disproportionate share of switchers.

My YouTube Music Experience So Far

Short answer: It’s OK.

Spotify, being singularly focused on audio, definitely has better layouts and user experience for audio-only content. The interface feels more intuitive for music discovery and playlist management. YouTube Music gets the job done.

That said, YouTube Music has some unexpected wins. For one, it resurfaced some of the old video songs I was fond of listening in the audio Music app, so the recommendation algorithm worked some what better than Spotify for me in this case. For another, YT Music has a Tesla app that lets me seamlessly play music and podcasts while driving, which wasn’t something I had considered before making the switch. The integration with my existing YouTube habits has also been surprisingly smooth.

The switch wasn’t as painful as I feared, and the financial benefit is immediate and ongoing. If you’re in a similar situation, paying for multiple overlapping subscriptions, it might be worth taking a weekend to explore migration tools and see if you can consolidate without losing what matters most to you. The friction is real, but it’s often more mental than practical.

I’ll save my detailed thoughts on improvements YouTube Music could make for a future post. For now, I’m genuinely happy that I’ll be saving $144 per year!