Four New Features Coming to YouTube Music
This November marks 10 years since YouTube launched its own music service . While YouTube Music isn’t as widely discussed as other streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify, it’s still hugely popular, with more than 125 million subscribers , including YouTube Premium users who get the service as part of their subscription.
In honor of YouTube Music’s 10th anniversary, the company is adding four new features for both free and paid users. They’re not as big as you’d expect from a 10th anniversary update, but there are still a few interesting changes worth noting.
Playlists to your taste
YouTube isn’t sharing details about the new feature, but a press release says this: Taste-based playlists are designed to introduce new music from groups of people with similar interests. Playlists are updated daily based on subscriber counts.
This could be an interesting way to crowdsource new music. Instead of adding new music manually, the algorithm takes into account the listening history of users of each playlist, and it adds new music accordingly.
Bandsintown Integration
In this update, YouTube announced a partnership with Bandsintown, a site that helps you discover new music in your area. When users watch a music video, short film, or artist channel, this new integration will notify them when the artist is performing near them. You can also get notifications about new artist songs, merch, and event dates.
New Icons for Music Videos
” Badges ” are like rewards for reaching certain goals or accomplishments on YouTube. Since last year, you may have seen the “First View” and “Top Listener” badges.
YouTube is rolling out new badges specifically for music videos. Artists can now earn badges for “views.” For example, if an artist reaches 100,000, a million, or a billion views, they’ll earn badges in return. It’s unclear whether fans will earn badges for contributing to the view count or if they only apply to the artist’s page.
Comments on albums and playlists (coming soon)
YouTube is announcing the ability to comment on albums and playlists, similar to how it does for music videos, but the company has not given a timeline for when the feature will launch.
As a reminder, YouTube Music is available for free on iOS, Android, and the web. You can subscribe to YouTube Music for $10.99 per month or get it as part of a YouTube Premium subscription for $13.99 per month.