YouTube Music adds user channel profiles to share, browse playlists

Compared to the main site, YouTube Music lacks social features like comments and offers more of an individual experience. That said, it still has public, shareable playlists and Google looks to be ramping up that capability with user channel pages in YouTube Music.

Similar to how all artists have pages, users now have access to their profiles. The quickest way to access is from Library on the web, navigating to the Playlists tab, and clicking your name on a collection you created.

This takes you to a simple page that shows your Google Account avatar, background image (from the main YouTube site), and a “Share” button with shortcuts to Twitter, Facebook, and the URL.

Below is a carousel of your public playlists. Those with several are presented with the option to view as a list. Like any other collection in YouTube Music, you can save by clicking “Add to library.”

At the moment, when you’re on another user’s playlist, there is no way to jump into their full profile. Thus, links to these pages will have to be manually shared.

Otherwise, this feature is functional on the web, and accessible from the Android and iOS apps by direct link. A secondary benefit of channels is letting users quickly see what playlists of theirs are public. Features like the ability to add a bio would help with personalization, as would vanity URLs.

While you could always manually share playlists before, the new user channels in YouTube Music allow you to further browse collections from people that are good at curating songs. More broadly, one could imagine YouTube elevating playlists from regular users alongside those from the editorial team.

This shift towards making the service more social follows work that we spotted in the mobile apps to let users create collaborative playlists.

Google tells us that YouTube Music is currently experimenting with user channels and hopes to roll it out more broadly over time.

Thanks Daniel