YouTube Music finally adds personalised playlists, but is it too late?
YouTube Music finally adds personalised playlists, but is it too late?
Thanks to Google’s ridiculously muddled approach, YouTube is so far behind Apple Music and Spotify in the music streaming race, it probably thinks it’s leading.
Indeed, YouTube Music is such an afterthought that its addition of personalised playlists, long after every major music streaming service has added them, probably shouldn’t even register as news.
In an announcement on Tuesday, YouTube said it was adding three personalised playlists, including Discover Mix, which is billed as a rival to Spotify’s Discover Weekly. The changes were announced this autumn and are now rolling out to subscribers.
The company is promising new tracks from artists you’ve never heard before, while blending in songs from artists you already enjoy.
Related: Spotify vs Apple Music
Spotify’s version is based upon more than a decade of listening data from users and has improved dramatically over time, so if you’re unfortunate enough to place your faith in YouTube Music as your streaming service of choice, we wouldn’t expect much in the way of deep cut recommendations.
There’s also a Release Mix playlist, which the company says will include new tracks from your favourite artists, as well as those bands YouTube believes streamers will enjoy. This one will update every Friday.
There’s also a regularly updating Your Mix playlist to keep an eye on, which will provide tracks based upon your listing habits. Again, Spotify provides users with up to six of these at a time, which regularly update.
“Our YouTube Music app has been out now for a couple of years, we’ve launched the YouTube Premium service and the app and now 71 different countries,” said YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal (via TechCrunch).
“And as we’ve rolled it out, we’ve gotten lots of feedback from our users about what they’d love to see,” he continued. “And one of the things that they tell us repeatedly is, they love the fact that, through a combination of things like machine learning and human beings that are music lovers, we put all this great music in front of our users in the YouTube Music app.”
