Have a YouTube music family plan? Be careful about accepting free trials

For the last six months, my YouTube Music account has been broken. If my wife and I ever wanted to listen to music at the same time, I'd either have to take my phone offline completely, or one of us just wouldn't listen to music at all. This isn't the first time it has happened either, but if I have anything to say about it, it'll be the last.

It all started back in November when I accepted a free 6-month trial to one of the Google Gemini advanced programs. This particular one included a YouTube Premium subscription as part of its model, which Google believes will help incentivize users to pay a little extra to get a lot of value. The problem is that I already had a YouTube Premium family subscription.

Worse yet, even some YouTube videos would cause my account to error out like this, making it beyond irritating to try to play the music I was paying for. Google was powerless to fix it because of one reason or another, ensuring my winter was filled with Silent Nights in more than one way until that blasted trial ended six months later.

Falling on deaf ears

At first, it took me a while to figure out what happened. Out of nowhere, I started getting these "playback paused because your account is being used in another location" errors in YouTube Music. That can't be possible, I thought; I have a family plan and nowhere near the maximum number of people on it!

Simultaneously, I also noticed a new "upgrade" button in the bottom right corner of my YouTube Music app. I assumed maybe it was a ploy by Google to get me to subscribe to one of its more expensive Google One plans or something similar, but it turns out this button appeared because my account had been flagged as a trial account.

Of course, this made no sense. I already had a family premium account, as evidenced by the photo above, yet a second trial was stacked on top and marked as the primary subscription for the account. So I did what any good paying customer would do: I asked for the manager.

YouTube Music support ran me through some steps I was hopeful would work. I was directed to cancel my paid Google One plan and let the trial take precedence, offloading the subscription cost from my budget for a while. That sounded great, but it didn't work.

Next, they had me disable family sharing on my Google One account to see if that would trigger a system-side permissions dialog or something similar, assuming that the problem was first caused by the trial not including family plan permissions. No dice. Even re-enabling family sharing didn't fix it.

At this point, support identified the stacked trial account as the underlying problem but said there's nothing they could do about it. Apparently, Google support doesn't have the power to alter subscriptions or cancel trials; only the user can.

But the biggest problem, of course, is that there's no way to cancel a trial once it has begun. Again, YouTube support confirmed this awful design, and my press contacts later confirmed it. The only thing I could do was wait until April 11, and I had 5 months to go by the time this was fully figured out.

So here I am on the other side of April 11, confirming that this was, in fact, the issue the entire time. Over the last three days, my wife and I have purposefully tested out all sorts of ways to play back music on multiple devices, and we never received a playback error. Everything worked as it should! Huzzah!

The moral of the story is this: watch out when you accept a free trial. Sometimes, a free trial can make you aware of some amazing value you didn't know existed, or even get you linked up with a service you can't wait to pay for. Other times, it might just ruin your day and keep it ruined for months. Don't be like me, just stay away from those stupid Google One and Gemini trials if you already pay for these services. They'll do nothing but cause problems.