Category: iPhone app

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Music made together may one day heal mankind. – from “We Gather Here Together” (YT)

For music streaming nowadays I mainly use YouTube Music, because I have YouTube Premium subscription. It’s not perfect, but YT Music has a decent collection, and functionality.

YouTube and YouTube Music

When I was listening to Ayen 何璟昕 music both via YT and YT Music, as I switch between them as I was trying to conserve some data usage (partially because I lost power and Wi-Fi a few days ago). I noticed that YT Music is sometimes automatically generated by YouTube (Google), for example this channel. More on YouTube automation here.

Also, I realized there are two ways we can avoid using cell phone data.

1) Listen to music on YT Music: if we download the video via Wi-Fi in advance, and listen to it in the Download mode, not the library mode. The playlist in Download mode can play continuously, or you can actually loop the playlist if you like;

2) Watch videos on YT, if we download the video via Wi-Fi in advance. If we start playing from the last downloaded video, it will continue to the next, and so on.

If we are watching the video from the library mode, it will use data on YT Music.

YT Music Sync from Library to Download: there is a sync icon button in the downloaded playlist, press it and a popup will show up, ask you to confirm, you say yes, and it will apply the update.

Some More Tips for YT and YT Music

Loop in YT: I just found out we can loop a single song on YouTube too (move mouse over the video, right mouse click, and you see an option of “Loop”. Also, sometimes YT has the “transcript” function (I think it depends on how the creator set it up), and you can follow along with the lyrics for a song (or words/captions for a video). Note the looping works both on Desktop and in the iOS app.

YT Music: you can loop a song or loop a playlist. The icon is at the bottom right when you play a song. If you just want to loop a song, tap twice and make sure you have a number “1” inside that loop.

A bug in YT Music (italics for emphasis):

I learned this lesson the hard way a few times. I found that, “saving to playlist” in YT Music website will mess up my playlist pretty badly. Now if I can stay away from doing that. By “messing up” I mean a lot of duplicates or songs that I don’t intend to add got added when I did the “save” 🙂

Also, I found recently, for many songs, we can jump directly from YT to YT Music by press a “play icon button” inside YT (when applicable).

Sometimes we need to get to the comments and edit. Below is the link getting to the comments.

Google – My Activity (YouTube comments)

Also, YouTube History has a link to “Comments”

A subtle bug in YT Music

Someday I hope I can become a product manager for YT Music and I noticed a subtle bug: in the YT music occasionally the cover page (the image and the song name) is wrong. The music or the song is still correct. The video is correct too.

Music industry

The landscape of digital music is overly fragmented, in my opinion. For example, in China it appears QQ音乐 and 网易云音乐 (Ayen何璟昕 on 网易云音乐) are popular. In the west Spotify and Apple Music are two largest platforms. Personally, I used mostly YT and YT Music as I have YT Premium Sub. Then there are the social media platforms: which are also fragmented, obviously.

Keep in mind in last 10 years or so, the music industry has experienced seismic shift – music is increasingly being streamed online, instead of the good old days of CD, or singles sales. I think it may have something impact on Ayen 何璟昕‘s journey becoming a musician/song writer/singer. She does have one advantage: her undergraduate major is digital media – and we can see some of her work in the MV (music video) she created.

I still remember the days at Best Buy there are racks and racks of CDs on display, it was probably 15 or 20 years ago. Both our 2012 Toyota Camry and 2012 Toyota Sienna still had CD player build in – both has bluetooth and USB too, so it can be connected to smartphone.

Google search “npr music indstry steaming” || NPR – How the music industry has changed in the first quarter of this century

Copyrights etc.

Also, I just came across this – 中国音乐人，困在版权里。从虾米音乐关停聊聊中国音乐人的版权困境。by Feng’s Music Channel (叨叨冯). You may read some of the comments if you know Chinese. It’s interesting to say the least.

This reminds me at St. Louis Children’s Choirs, they check the copyrights of the music or the song they are singing, and pay the author a royalty or something like that. I don’t know if they use companies such as Swank Motion Pictures or some other company. Btw, our old daughter sung at St. Louis Children’s Choirs from 1st grade to 7th grade, and we have many wonderful memories.

More about music copyrights in China: 什么是音乐版权？by HEM Records

I recall many years ago, probably in year 2004, I heard a lot of controversy of copyrights issues at YouTube too. That’s when YouTube was bought by Google.

In terms of singers, think I am going to write about Sandy Lam (Lin Yi’lian) and G.E.M. Deng Ziqi next.

It’s hard to make a decent living as a musician

I am not talking about the top dogs, such as Taylor Swift in the USA, or G.E.M. Deng Ziqi in HK. They make money both from music (even from streaming, because of their music are being played quite a bit on streaming platforms), and from live performance.

But most musicians are not that lucky: the two income streams are usually not enough to make decent living. I saw people work on a few other things to make ends meet: teach, write customized music (song, lyrics, collaborate etc.), make/sell instruments. For example, I saw many song writers do customized music. And Ayen何璟昕 does all three. Carlos makes instruments.

(Update 05-03-2025) I confirmed above with a friend who has about 3 millions streaming (a year) on Spotify. He told the gross profit is about $10,000. But he needs to pay record label and recoding studio etc., so basically he has nothing left after that. He also said people like Taylor Swift has billions of streaming for her songs. Also Spotify has better payout ratio for people like Taylor Swift, compared to ordinary creators Joe and Jane. Last but not least, this is not new phenomena: it was like that pre-streaming, and I assume that’s applicable for the days when CD, cassette and vinyl were the main media for distribute the music. So if I could expand it a bit, it’s basically similar to the wealth distribution of the USA: the rich get richer, the poor becomes poorer. (Update 05-16-2025) This reminds me of the similar point Warren Buffett said here on YT Shorts – “a more and more specialized economy”.

(Update 05-09-2025) I looked around a bit more. I found couple places that musicans can sell their products.

TomPlay website

Gum Road (also google search “any musicians successfully sell on gumroad”)

Related: Google Search “is it harder to survive as musician”

Last but not least, [Piano Cover] 八三夭 831 – 想見你想見你想見你｜你沒看過的超難還原鋼琴版 (the piano instruction video and also the author sells music sheet too)

(Update 05-12-2025) I found couple music platforms that act between musicians and the YT. For example, I found this one ewway.com at 痴人. And I came across another one Bquate SAC from this song 此生无憾 (国粤对唱版). I like to do a bit more research in the near future.

(Update 05-13-2025) Here is another one 敢开始 submitted by Tencent. In this case, it seems the song was submitted by the publisher to YT Music. You can watch the actual music video here –東風日產勁客《敢開始》Ayen何璟昕 原創歌曲 既有所想，就勇敢開始，不為一個結果 .

I noticed “Auto-generated by YouTube” (link goes to Reddit) in the description. From programming or software integration point of view, I speculate the music platforms have backend integrations with Google/YouTube via API. This is likely accomplished via a batch process.

Last not not least, I found the competition among Chinese songs are so tense, and for example, for 哪吒2主题曲 — 此生无憾. I am aware of 7 versions on YT. And this is only a partial list. One of them is very gimmicky, and obviously I won’t give special attention to the channel or the video. But you can guess which one 🙂

1

2

3 – 此生无憾 (国语女生版)

4

5

6

7 – 哪吒主题曲【2】完整版《此生无憾 》张碧晨演唱👍🌹好听

PS:

Also refer to How to listen to Chinese music or songs nowadays

PS 2:

I noticed one Ladue HS graduate picked composition as the college major. I think the college is JHU. I want to wish the senior best of luck.

PS 3:

A thread on Apple Music