Ron Amado, from Ars Technica:

YouTube Music is really only for The Music Renter—someone who wants to pay $10 per month, every month, forever, for “Music Premium.” This fee is to buy a monthly streaming license for music you do not own, and I’d imagine a good portion of it goes to music companies. When you don’t pay this rental fee, YouTube Music feels like a demo app.

I prefer to own my music, and I own a lot of independent music that wouldn’t be covered under this major-record-label-streaming-license anyway, so I have no interest in this service. The problem is YouTube Music also locks regular music-playback features behind this monthly rental fee, even for music you’ve uploaded to the service. The biggest offense is that you can’t use Google Cast without paying the rental fee, but when it’s music that I own and a speaker that I own, that’s really not OK. Google Music did not do this.

These last couple of weeks I’ve actually been working on a personal music app that will playback music uploaded to S3. It was mainly for listening to music that I composed myself, although being able to listen to music that I’ve purchased and ripped to MP3 was a key motivating factor here as well. I was aware that such services existed so I occasionally wondered if my time could be better spent doing something else. Now, I feel like I’ve made the right choice here.