Google Podcasts is dead but Google’s own podcast isn’t on YouTube Music

Google Podcasts is the latest service to join the ever-growing Google Graveyard. The company is asking dedicated podcast listeners using the service to switch over to YouTube Music. Half a year after announcing the shutdown, the music-focused service is still a worse alternative than Google Podcasts, and there is one way that becomes strikingly obvious: Google’s own Made by Google podcast isn’t available on YouTube Music.

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While you can listen to the Made by Google podcast on YouTube itself just fine, it isn’t showing up in YouTube Music when you search for it using the podcast filter. Using YouTube to consume podcasts is far from ideal, though. If you’re not a Premium subscriber, you’ll have to keep your screen turned on all the time and keep watching the static podcast cover since background play is locked to the paid subscription.

This is a wider issue with YouTube Music as a podcast platform. Rather than working with any RSS-based podcast out of the box like virtually any other competing podcast app, Google decided to make things more difficult. Initially, YouTube Music only offered a selection of podcasts that were uploaded to YouTube itself and marked as podcast content within the video platform. The company has since made it easier for creators to add their podcasts to the service, but it’s all about creators themselves becoming active to be visible on YouTube Music.

YouTube Music makes accessing many popular shows incredibly complicated

Adding many popular podcasts on YouTube Music is needlessly complicated

In the most typical Google fashion, the company ended up with a poor workaround to add any and all podcast content, which can usually be found via search in almost all other podcast players. To add a podcast to your library that isn’t available in YouTube Music natively, you need to head to your library, select podcasts, and look for the Add podcast shortcut, which opens up a box for you to enter a URL in. You need to opt for similar workarounds in other apps when you want to add custom RSS feeds (like password-protected ones from Patreon), but it’s something you’ll rarely need to do for popular and publicly available podcasts.

In YouTube Music’s case, there’s a big disclaimer that a podcast added this way doesn’t necessarily adhere to YouTube’s community guidelines, but come on Google — this is literally how every other podcast app works, including the one you’ve sunset in the US. And it really irks me that that’s the only way you can currently add Google’s own podcast to the service.

To recap: Just based on the poor selection of podcasts, YouTube Music is a worse alternative to Google Podcasts right out of the gate. Most people who liked Google Podcasts for its simplicity will likely not be happy to use podcasts within a service that is mostly tailored to music, too. In the end, this will likely mean that a lot of people will switch to an alternative that isn’t made by Google. In a worst case scenario for Google, this might even push some people to abandon YouTube Music for Spotify altogether. The service has countless issues of its own, but at least it offers virtually all podcasts you could be looking for without workarounds, which is arguably more elegant than YouTube Music’s mess.