YouTube Music website gets song/video switcher on the Now Playing screen

Abner Li | Mar 2 2022 - 9:00 am PT

After testing for some time, YouTube Music is finally bringing the song/video switcher to the Now Playing UI of the web client.

Just above cover art is the Song and Video switcher that has been a staple of the Now Playing screen on Android and iOS.

There are two primary use cases for this switcher. The first is switching between the official music video and the album version of a song, as evidenced by cover art appearing in the latter instance. Your playback position is retained when switching. The switcher appears grayed out when songs aren’t available as videos.

The other use is disabling the video aspect of a live recording, which just uses the thumbnail as cover art. It’s useful for those that just want to listen to audio, with users previously resorting to minimizing Now Playing at the expense of being able to see the Up Next queue.

YouTube Music has been testing the switcher for some time on the desktop, but it looks to be widely rolled out today. It’s another example of the web client getting feature parity with the mobile apps, while the Related tab was introduced in recent months.

Google should also theme the background of Now Playing to album art instead of defaulting to just a dark background. This was previously spotted but never widely rolled out.