YouTube Music

Is YouTube Music safe?

Yes. YouTube Music is a safe app for listening, and its account security is among the best of any music service, because you sign in with a Google account that supports passkeysPasskeyA way to sign in without a password. Your device holds a key tied to one website or app and unlocks it with your fingerprint, face or PIN.More in the glossary and two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary. We score it 65/100, well above the main YouTube app (54) and Spotify (57), but below Apple Music (78).

The catch is data rather than danger. Google does not label YouTube Music as tracking you across other companies' apps, yet everything you play goes into the YouTube History in your Google account, which shapes recommendations and, by default, the ads Google shows you elsewhere.

What YouTube Music collects

Apple's privacy label for YouTube Music is noticeably lighter than the one for YouTube. It has no "Data Used to Track You" section at all. Eleven types of data are linked to your identity: purchases, location, contact info, contacts, user content, search history, browsing history, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics and other data. On Android, the Google Play listing says the app shares no data with other companies.

That does not make it private in the way Apple Music is. Google is itself one of the world's largest ad companies. Its privacy policy, updated in October 2026, says that with YouTube History turned on, the videos you watch and the things you search for are saved in your account. Songs count as videos here. The free tier plays ads, and personalised ads are switched on by default for adult accounts. Paying for Premium removes the ads, not the data collection.

Ask Music, the generative AI feature, deserves a mention. Google says it can pull your listening and watch history, top artists, songs and podcasts into the language model to answer questions and build mixes. That is the same data YouTube Music already holds, but it is now passing through an AI system as well.

Account security

This is where YouTube Music is strongest. The Google account behind it offers passkeysPasskeyA way to sign in without a password. Your device holds a key tied to one website or app and unlocks it with your fingerprint, face or PIN.More in the glossary, two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary and Google's Security Checkup, and Google pays researchers through one of the largest bug bounty programmes in tech. Google Play says data is encrypted in transit and that the Android app has passed an independent security review against a global standard. We found no breach of YouTube Music data.

Because one Google account opens Gmail, Drive and YouTube Music together, protecting that account protects everything. A passkey is the simplest way to do it.

Comments, uploads and children

Most of what you hear is licensed music, which carries little risk. But YouTube Music also pulls in user uploads from YouTube: covers, remixes, live recordings and podcasts that nobody checks before they go live.

It is also more social than most music apps. According to Google's help pages, you can comment publicly on songs, videos, podcasts and uploaded music, and those comments appear in both YouTube and YouTube Music. Artists can run Fan Communities with posts, polls and comment threads. That brings the same comment spam seen on YouTube, including replies that impersonate artists and ask you to message them on another app.

The App Store rates the app 13+ and lists age assurance and parental controls. For younger children, a supervised account set up through Google Family Link is the safer route, since it lets a parent choose a content level.

Regulators and YouTube Music

YouTube Music has not been fined in its own name. The only regulator decision that names it came from Korea. In July 2024 Korea's Fair Trade Commission accused Google of unfairly bundling YouTube Music with YouTube Premium, which it said forced people who wanted ad-free video to pay for music too. Rather than fight the case, Google offered a consent decision, which the commission accepted in November 2025. Google agreed to launch YouTube Premium Lite, a video-only plan priced at 8,500 won a month on Android and the web, and to hold its prices for at least a year. The commission did not rule on whether the bundle was illegal.

Google's larger penalties do not name YouTube Music, so we treat them as background. That includes the $170 million Google and YouTube paid in 2019 over children's data: the order covers the general-audience YouTube video platform, not YouTube Music.

How to use YouTube Music more safely

1. Add a passkeyPasskeyA way to sign in without a password. Your device holds a key tied to one website or app and unlocks it with your fingerprint, face or PIN.More in the glossary or two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary to your Google account at myaccount.google.com.
2. Open My Ad Center and turn off personalised ads if you do not want listening to shape the ads you see.
3. Pause YouTube History, or set it to auto-delete, if you want less stored about your listening.
4. Ignore comment replies that claim to be from an artist and ask you to move to Telegram or WhatsApp.
5. Give children under 13 a supervised account rather than access to an adult account.

How we scored it

Security (74) and the regulatory record (74) are YouTube Music's strongest factors. The first rests on Google's account protection and a clean breach record, the second on a Korean consent decision that settled the bundling case without a finding or fine. Privacy (48) is the weakest, because listening feeds Google's own ad profile even without third-party tracking. Scams and harmful content (70) is held back by public comments and unchecked uploads.