Maybe they should have just let people upload audio files with a title card, rather than fragment the service into another app. Would have fixed the bandwidth/battery problem and kept the interface, network, etc.
Lots of music just have a static image anyway, I wonder if YouTube couldn't figure something out to automatically re-encode such videos into audio-only streams, making them less bandwidth intensive.
I'm no coder but that doesn't sound like something impossible to do.
