For those without a premium membership, listening to music on YouTube Music is like stepping on an ad mine. If YouTube’s experiments with pause ads are anything to go by, you could soon be seeing more ads not just on YouTube, but on YouTube Music as well. Fortunately, there are ways for free users to protect themselves from this kind of corporate harassment without giving up your library. Here’s how to get YouTube Music Premium for free on Android.

To get YouTube Music Premium without succumbing to Google’s strategies, you’ll need to ditch the official YouTube app in favor of a patched version of it. Here’s how to do that.

When you first open the patched YouTube Music app, you’ll be greeted with the message “MicroG GmsCore is not installed”. This is fine, as it wants us to install microG services (which we’ll need to log into our Google account) and also redirects to its github page.

You can see if you have YouTube Music Premium or not as soon as you open the app. If you get an ad saying “Try YouTube Music Premium”, you don’t have YouTube Music Premium. The most likely issue for this is the YouTube Music apk that was downloaded earlier.