When you open a playlist, you can add it to your library, download it for offline listening, add it to a queue, shuffle it, share it, or open a "radio" station, which is a dynamic selection of similar tunes that you can vote up or down like Pandora. For example, the mobile app detected that I was at work and presented some instrumental playlists with labels like Ambient Bass, Classical Focus, Epic Film Scores, and Muted Jazz. Your Google account can track a wide variety of things if you want it to, from your commute route to your favorite restaurants, so this is basically an extension of that. Location-based recommendations: You can optionally let YT Music generate recommendations based on your physical location, another thing we haven't seen from the competition. For music lovers, this is the best version of YouTube by far, which itself has proven invaluable as a cultural archive. Now, all of this content is coordinated under the YouTube Music banner (and apparently legitimized from a legal standpoint), so you can delve into it without having to engage with YouTube's growing clickbait problem. Huge and accessible library of music videos: You might not think of video as something important to a music service, but don't forget that YouTube has a colossal vault of music videos and concert footage, many of which have never been found elsewhere. This radio function is available for every artist, album, song, and playlist in the catalog, so you get many points of entry to start exploring. This list is private by default, but you can make it public and share it with your friends. Liking a song also adds it to the Liked Videos section of your regular YouTube account. Two, you can vote up or down on a song to refine the river voting up tacks more similar songs onto the station's queue, and voting down removes similar songs. One, it's an endless river of music, whereas a regular playlist has a specific number of tracks. These are a type of playlist generated by the streaming service, with two important differences. But overall, the app feels snappy, makes good use of screen space - and connects directly to a version of Google's famously capable search engine that's been optimized for music.ĭiscovering new music is easy and inviting: Like Spotify and Pandora, YouTube Music has "radio" stations. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a way to delete specific songs from your downloads it's all or nothing. Here you can see how much space is available on your device and how much the app is using, a toggle for offline mixtapes (a dynamic selection of recommendations), and a "Clear Downloads" action. When you tap on Downloads, a gear icon appears in the upper right, which is a shortcut to your download settings. The Library tab in the lower right features the content that you've played most recently, followed by separate sections for your downloads, playlists, albums, liked songs, and artists. The home screen features a selection of themed playlists, recommendations based on your listening, a "New & Trending" section, new releases, and separate sections for music videos and concert footage. Even the video content is largely stripped of its YouTube-ness: There are no descriptions, no comments section, no sidebar of similar recommended clips just the video, some basic controls, an action menu (add to playlist, share, start radio, go to artist's page), and a list of the other videos, if you're watching from a playlist.Īs far as basic navigation goes, it basically feels like Play Music or Spotify. The app is handsome and easy to navigate: Despite the association with YouTube (you'll even be able to access it via web browser at ), YT Music shares little of the video streaming service's aesthetics, instead looking more like Google Play Music or another conventional tune-streaming platform. Unlimited skips and on-demand listening are customarily reserved for paying customers, so we're surprised to see Google opening the gates this wide. There's still a free version, and it's generous: You can't download tracks or listen in the background, and there will be ads in between some songs, but the free version of YouTube Music still offers features that we're not used to seeing in the competition's ad-supported tier: You can play specific songs and skip to the next song in a list as many times as you like. is in the "Early Access" club, and we're prepared to tell you if Spotify, Apple Music, or another established rival is better for partying 'til the break of dawn. Last week, Google relaunched YouTube Music as a direct competitor to other streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, an evolution that we'd been expecting for some time as the company sorts out the branding of its increasingly overlapping streaming services.
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