At the risk of pointing out the obvious: Google's Spotify clone, "YouTube Music", has such miracles of UX design as:
- a dislike button
- a playlist that works like you'd expect
- a "play album" button
And tons of other similar totally obvious things that Spotify doesn't have¹ for no good reason at all.
If you have no qualms about using a Google product that might end any day, then I think it's simply just Spotify, done properly. I think it's especially impressive since how meh Google tends to be at UX.
As an extra bonus it has a huge catalog since it has both the usual label-provided music and everything that ever got uploaded to YouTube that their AI thinks is likely a music video.
¹ EDIT: I noticed, before rage-quitting Spotify over their terrible UX, that some of these omissions are platform specific. Eg IIRC their web player had a "play album" button but the Android app didn't, you had to either play an album on shuffle or hope that today's playlist state + star alignment would miraculously let you play the entire album when you started the first song.
(YT Music looks and works exactly the same on every platforms I've used it on)
Fun fact: you can downvote a song on YouTube Music and they'll continue to recommend it in your mixes or when you reaches the end of your current playlist.
Since I have YouTube Premium anyway, I use YouTube Music, and before that used Google Music, but it's pretty terrible in a number of ways.
I don't know about YouTube Music, but YouTube's recommender is doing such bad job for me, that I stand little chance to become 'engaged' (like eternally recommending the same video that I'm uninterested in but Google thinks I must see). I watch videos found by search queries, mostly via DDG too and not YT search.
There are plenty of features on spotify I think could be improved but I have always been pretty happy with their playlists. What are the things that google does better?
YouTube Music UI is horrible. I've get used to but still have some compliants.
Web: It doesn't show +1/-1/volume/whatever unless its window is smaller than 1280px IIRC. Volume control is useless because it's too loud even at minimum+1.
Android: Adding playlist/+1/whatever shows toast at the bottom of screen, it blocks pulling drawer for about 10 secs.
If you have no qualms about using a Google product that might end any day, then I think it's simply just Spotify, done properly. I think it's especially impressive since how meh Google tends to be at UX.
As an extra bonus it has a huge catalog since it has both the usual label-provided music and everything that ever got uploaded to YouTube that their AI thinks is likely a music video.
¹ EDIT: I noticed, before rage-quitting Spotify over their terrible UX, that some of these omissions are platform specific. Eg IIRC their web player had a "play album" button but the Android app didn't, you had to either play an album on shuffle or hope that today's playlist state + star alignment would miraculously let you play the entire album when you started the first song.
(YT Music looks and works exactly the same on every platforms I've used it on)