YouTube Music is a proprietary, closed-source streaming service from Google that combines a licensed music catalog with YouTube's video and user-uploaded content. Full details →

Switching from YouTube Music to an open source alternative means moving off a Google-account-tied service built around licensed and user-uploaded catalog content, to a server that streams only files you provide. Navidrome offers a straightforward, self-hosted Subsonic-compatible server for a personal library, while Funkwhale adds federation, letting your instance interconnect with others in a Mastodon-like network. Both skip YouTube Premium’s bundled video subscription entirely, at the cost of losing access to the live performances, covers, and user-uploaded content that make YouTube Music’s catalog distinct.

Open Source Alternatives

Navidrome is a free, open source, self-hosted music server that streams your own audio library through a modern web player and Subsonic-compatible mobile apps, as an alternative to licensed streaming services.

GPL-3.0

Funkwhale is a free, open source, federated music streaming server built on ActivityPub, letting communities share and stream self-hosted music libraries across independent servers.

AGPL-3.0