Selections aren't entirely universal, which I think hurts a lot. I subscribe to Spotify and it's mostly great, but sometimes it just doesn't have something for no discernible reason. Usually I'm discovering music in the app so I never even notice, but every so often I want to listen to something specific and it's just not there. YouTube becomes my backup for that.
And specifically for "latest albums," they seem to do a delayed release a lot. I saw this recently with Clapton's I Still Do, but it shows up with many others too. Often they'll release a single track for streaming, and have a link to purchase the whole thing. And even now that they've made the album available for streaming, there's one track missing!
It's a bit frustrating to pay a subscription only to have it show me an advertisement to buy an album they refuse to stream. I'm less familiar with other services but it sounds like they're similar.
One trouble with the Steam analogy is that there's nothing for games like YouTube is for music. I can go from zero to listening to a particular piece of music in barely more time than it takes to type the name of the song. Pirating games takes a lot more work.
And specifically for "latest albums," they seem to do a delayed release a lot. I saw this recently with Clapton's I Still Do, but it shows up with many others too. Often they'll release a single track for streaming, and have a link to purchase the whole thing. And even now that they've made the album available for streaming, there's one track missing!
It's a bit frustrating to pay a subscription only to have it show me an advertisement to buy an album they refuse to stream. I'm less familiar with other services but it sounds like they're similar.
One trouble with the Steam analogy is that there's nothing for games like YouTube is for music. I can go from zero to listening to a particular piece of music in barely more time than it takes to type the name of the song. Pirating games takes a lot more work.