The cost is €9.99 per month in Ireland which is probably a bit high for what you get (€119.88 a year).
One feature of this subscription is ad-free playback on Youtube and YouTube Music. For mobile this is genuinely useful, as ads from companies like Wish are incredibly terrible and there is no other way to describe it.
The way around ads on Youtube mobile is to skip the ads when they come up after 3 seconds. I don't think there is an adblocker that works on the Youtube app, but if you open Youtube in a mobile browser with an adblock you can remove ads on mobile. Most people probably don't do this though. The annoying thing about ads on Youtube is that a Youtuber can midroll(place an advertisement in the middle of a video) you a number of times so if you want to watch on the app, you must endure it.
On desktop everyone and their father should be using an adblock extension that blocks ads on websites and on Youtube. So the adblocking feature is redundant when you are on desktop.
The second useful feature of YouTube Music subscription is offline listening when you have downloaded the music and don't want to be using your 4G and the ability to close the Youtube or Youtube Music app on mobile and use other apps or just lock the phone and go about your business.
This is useful when cycling to work I can listen to a podcast from Jordan Peterson or Kids See Ghosts from Kanye and Kid Cudi.
Like most paid subscriptions, YouTube takes away features you should already have, downloads, offline listening, Youtube playing in the background while using other apps and then makes you pay for them in the subscription.
Main Flaws with YouTube Music:
Cost for a product that is still many developments away from being good.
The offline feature is pretty bad when the app decides some tracks need to be redownloaded again. So you open the app and there are only half an album left to listen to online. The app seems to be constantly redownloading the same music. People have complained about this online to Youtube and got nowhere with it. I don't know how many times during the free trial of this app were the albums I downloaded for offline use redownloaded. If I didn't have unlimited use of broadband at home, this could be very expensive. Who decided that this is a useful feature?
I traveled over the summer and music I had downloaded for the trip was geo-restricted, which is utterly frustrating. I went to a country with over 100 million people in it and for whatever reason Youtube Music isn't launched there yet, so the app was next to useless. Yeh I should have read the terms and conditions but you just expect a decent service worldwide at least in the developed world with big populations.
Something that doesn't impact me directly but the artists are paid shockingly badly in comparison to other streaming sites.
source
I'd love free market economics to allow me to suggest a price to Google for this subscription, lets say once a month I could offer to pay them X euro per month for the service and they can accept or reject my offer. Instead of being a price taker who doesn't want to pay 9.99 per month, it would be great if Google could charge each person the maximum they are willing to pay. It would be an experiment in pure economics. The cost to them of one additional user is probably cents per month, so I don't see why they have such a high fixed price. I'm never ever going to shop on Wish.com or use other scammy ads from Youtube to buy products. My suggestion would be one way to monetize me as a customer.
Honestly it's a poor enough product, my advice use the free trial and cancel the subscription thereafter. If the price comes down to 4 euro a month, I'd pay for it.
Paid subscription at 9.99 per month 3/10