YouTube Music makes you pay to get most from app

The new YouTube music app. Richard Vogel / AP Photo

If you were going to reinvent MTV for a mobile generation, you’d probably come up with something like YouTube Music.

It’s a video-first music service that can also play in the background, like you would expect a music app to do. That sets it apart from other music apps, many of which give you a choice of videos or songs – but not ­interchangeably.

However, while YouTube Music offers a lot of interesting features, most of them require a subscription to the new YouTube Red service, which will set you back US$10 (Dh36) a month, or $13 if you sign up through YouTube’s iPhone app. Without Red, YouTube Music will impose adverts similar to those you see on the YouTube website, and several functions won’t work at all. New users can sign up for a 14-day free trial of Red, but to continue commercial free you’ll need to pony up.

YouTube Music is first and foremost a music-video app, albeit one designed with an awareness that most people will be using it on their phones. For those times when you would rather listen than watch, you can toggle the app to audio-only mode, which turns off the video and replaces it with a still image. You can even turn off the screen completely and keep listening while you do something else.

But here is the first blow to users of the free version: the ­audio-only mode is only available to paid subscribers. You can also shrink the video to a little strip at the bottom of the app, where it will continue playing in a cropped format while you look for the next video. The app will even keep the music playing if you switch to other tasks, checking your email, for example – but, again, only if you’ve paid for Red.

There are also some curious omissions. For instance, there’s no easy way to create a playlist in which you can build a queue of videos to play one after the other.

The app does offer "song stations", which build queues of videos from artists related to the one you are listening to. You can toggle the range of the resulting mix with options such as "less variety", "more variety" or "balanced". I started a station with Passenger's Let Her Go, and so far I am pretty happy with the "balanced" playlist it created, which included Counting Stars from OneRepublic and Burn by Ellie Goulding.

You can also play all of the videos you have given the thumbs up to, which turns that grouping into a crude sort of favourites playlist.

The app is much less cluttered than competing services such as Apple Music, which has more lists and tabs than you’ll know what to do with. YouTube Music limits the tabs to three – home, hot (trending videos), and thumbs up (your favourites).

Home offers recommended videos, and it is easy to find something playable.

Your mileage may vary with the “hot” tab – it didn’t do much for me, although I’m usually a bit out of sync with the mainstream.

There is one other fun feature, called “offline mixtape”. This automatically saves 20 audio-­only songs for you based on your tastes, for when you know you’re going to get spotty reception. I wish it saved the videos instead of only the audio, but this will at least keep the music playing in a pinch. Alas, offline mixtapes are also disabled in the ad-­supported version of the app.

YouTube Music makes Google’s $10-a-month music subscription a lot more attractive. Paying the premium not only unlocks all the features in YouTube Music itself, it also gets you ad-free playback on the main YouTube app, access to Google Play Music and, further down the road, will also give you some original material from ­YouTube stars.

* The Associated Press