One of the biggest first-world problems of the past decade has been our inability to listen to our favourite songs on YouTube while doing other things on our iPhones. As many of you remind us in our Facebook comments regularly, scientists can land robots on a comet, but as soon as you close out of your YouTube app or tab on your phone, the music stops abruptly.

But clever tech lovers online have found a work-around for this problem (for iPhone users at least), and we've done our own testing to prove that it really does work - the only thing that we can't figure out is why we weren't made aware of this sooner.

Don't take our word for it, go and try it for yourself using the steps below.

To make this work, you first need to ditch the official YouTube app (admit it, it's terrible for searching anyway) and find your favourite song on YouTube via your Safari browser. Start it playing, skip through the ad, and then hit the home button to take you back to your home screen.

Predictably, the music will stop. But if you're wearing headphones with a little mic/controller, all you have to do is hit the play button, and the song will start again, allowing you to use YouTube like a free music streaming service. Seriously, it's as simple as that.

If you're not using headphones, or they don't have one of those little buttons on the cord, that's fine too. Just lock your phone, hit the home button, and then swipe up to open the control centre - you know, the screen where you switch on your torch.

Under the screen brightness setting, you should see the artist and name of your song with a play button icon below. Simply hit that, and voila, you're good to go. 

For anyone who's been doing this for years, we're sorry to state the obvious, but for the rest of us, it's quite literally life changing (like we said, first-world problem). We haven't tested the technique on Androids, but feedback on the Internet suggests that, unfortunately, it doesn't work. But let us know if you guys have evidence to the contrary.

So now that you have that part of your life sorted out, you probably have one lingering question: What does a science lover listen to on YouTube with this new-found ability? 

Don't worry, we've got your back. Check out these science videos that don't require you to actually watch them to appreciate their awesomeness (and enjoy feeding your cats on Neko Atsume or scrolling through Instagram at the same time):