I’ve been subscribed to YouTube Music since it was still Google Play Music; I originally bought it as a gift to my daughter for her birthday one year, and I enjoyed it enough to keep using it. When I discovered it also comes with YouTube Premium? Game-changer. 

I spent years curating my algorithm on YTM, until I heard the music I liked. But in recent months, it had become obvious that the algorithm was repeating itself, and also shoehorning me into a certain style of music that, while I certainly liked it, it wasn’t diverse enough for me. 

Over Thanksgiving every year, Sirius XM does a free period where you can listen to most of their channels on your car radio (if your car radio has a SXM receiver). I always looked forward to that because I was able to hear something different, something more interesting than my YTM selections or the two stations in Atlanta that I can actually stomach listening to. This past year I actually gave purchasing a subscription some strong consideration. 

But one of my partners already has a SXM subscription, and she doesn’t ever use the app. So she logged into the app on my phone for me, and it has changed my life. I built a library of about fifty stations, a combination of standard ones and “Xtra” channels — stations you can only hear on the app or your computer. I will say the app doesn’t work exactly how the commercials claim it does (for example, I searched for a specific countdown but instead of being able to start the countdown where I wanted to I had to listen to the entire thing), but it’s good enough. 

Now I have a new musical algorithm, and it is “go through the stations until I find something I like, or at least am interested enough in to keep listening to.” Basically how things were in the old days of radio, when I was growing up and there were more than just two rock stations on the dial. 

That’s one thing radio will have that services like YTM never will: a complete lack of algorithmic selection. Sure, it’s nice that YTM knows my favorite artists and music types, and I will admit that when I’m traveling or I need spanking scene music I still use YTM regularly, but there’s just something nostalgic and comforting about listening to the radio. 

(By the way, this post is not an ad and I am receiving no monetary recompense from any of the companies named in it.)