YouTube Music sending ‘new release’ notifications on Android

Abner Li | Feb 27 2020 - 8:43 am PT

Like on the full video service, recommendations are at the heart of YouTube Music and its Home feed. The YouTube Music mobile apps now look to actually be sending out “New release for you” notifications.

There’s some history to notifications in YouTube Music, mainly how there’s been two toggles in settings to enable since the app relaunched in 2018:

Notifications: Notify on this device
Recommendation notifications: Notify me of videos I might like based on what I watch

Despite those two controls, most users have never actually received alerts outside the app for recommended listens, note how the latter preference only specifies “videos.”

This morning, several users reported (via Reddit) receiving a “New release for you” notification that features the album name and artist, as well as cover art. A silent notification on Android 10, tapping opens the work in question.

It’s similar to the various carousels of recommendations that appear in the Home tab — specifically “New releases,” which recently added the ability to “See all” with a grid view. This is one of the more useful and pressing notifications for the app to generate, and hopefully it gets a wider launch moving forward and more fine-grained user controls.