Google has added a host of new YouTube Music updates throughout the month of February and March, as it hopes to challenge Spotify's stronghold on the market.
The biggest upgrade looks to target discovering new music, something I certainly struggle with. This applies directly to Song Radio and playlist automixes, making it so artist diversity is better improved. Google has revealed that it has seen a positive reception and a higher increase in song discovery since it was implemented.
"We’ve read your feedback and concerns with Song Radio (and playlist automixes) and our teams are committed to improving this experience for listeners on YouTube Music. Keeping this in mind, we’ve made changes that increase artist diversity in these playlists – by improving the back-end logic that nominates the music that shows up in them," said YouTube community manager Hazel Satamkar.
Keeping with playlists, the features have been expanded on iOS and Android. Now when you click on the three dot icon, a new "shelf" can be found that will display the user's most recently modified playlists as well as the "Your likes" playlist underneath. All other playlists are then listed in alphabetical order. The option to save a queue as a playlist on Android devices is now available too, following its previous roll out to iOS users
Another update is specifically for YouTube Music on Smart TVs and games consoles, removing duplicate videos from the "Listen again" option. An error in Google's logic would recognise the same thumbnail and therefore play the same music because of its slightly altered user interface. This is now fixed.
Anyone that is a YouTube Music Premium subscriber can now switch seamlessly between audio and video songs. This was originally made available for those on the mobile version but is now also available on browser. Similarly, the shuffle and play option has been improved on smartwatches, now allowing shuffled playlists on downloaded albums, something not previously available.
Finally, one of the last major things to highlight is that any artist pages from YouTube Music can now be shared to Snapchat stories. This builds off an update in October that allows users to share songs, videos and playlists that they're listening to on YouTube Music to the app. The full list of new updates available across iOS and Android can be found on the YouTube Music Help blog.
Google has had a big focus on the quality of life updates as of late – most notably, deploying a new Google Maps upgrade that will not only come in handy when travelling globally but looks to save you money.
