There are several tricks to listening to music on YouTube with the screen off, but the simplest and most practical for me is the one I brought you here. I also pay for Spotify, but most of the time there are music compilation videos on YouTube, podcasts that interest me, or a random video I want to listen to. As a rule of thumb, unless you pay for YouTube Premium, the app mutes the audio when you turn off the screen or put YouTube in the background.

However, there is a very simple method to listen to YouTube videos when the screen is off or while another application is on the screen. And it works perfectly. Without further complications. There are other options, but I’ve gone this route in my case for a few years now and it’s worked great for me. And all things considered, it sometimes surprises me that there are colleagues who don’t know about this option. That’s why I’m encouraged to recommend it to you.

All we need to do is install the Brave browser. I use it on Android, but it’s also available on iOS. It is a popular browser available for free on Play Store and App Store.

Unlike Chrome and other browsers, Brave allows YouTube and other services to play in the background. To activate this option we will have to go to the sections. Settings -> Media -> Background Playback. And that’s it. When this option is activated we can go directly to YouTube, turn off the screen and the video will continue to play.

As I said, the operation has no other meaning. We go to YouTube in the browser, put the video we want and that’s it. We can stop it whenever we want from the notification bar.

A very practical use is to create playlists on YouTube and upload them from Brave. By doing this, we will have a list of songs for practical purposes, but we do not have to pay for the music service. The truth is that YouTube has a huge repertoire of songs.

I’ve been using this trick when I don’t want to pull Spotify since Brave was updated in 2017. It works offline and even with a floating window on iOS. While it’s surprising that Chrome doesn’t directly allow this functionality, it’s understandable considering Google charges to allow it under YouTube Premium.

It’s also possible to use YouTube with the screen off with browsers like Firefox or Chrome, but it doesn’t work as well and won’t work right away. With Brave, yes. There is no more mystery in Brave than playing the video and listening to it all the time. If you usually listen to YouTube music on your mobile phone and want it to remain in the background all the time, I recommend you try it.

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