YouTube Music adds multi-select to the web app [U]

Abner Li | Jul 2 2022 - 10:10 am PT

A big pain point of Google’s current streaming service for some is the lack of basic music-app features. Multi-select in list views has been one such absence, but YouTube Music is now rolling out that functionality.

Update 7/2: YouTube Music’s web app is more widely rolling out multi-select today. When viewing an album/playlist, hovering over a song will see the track length at the right replaced by a checkbox as thumbs up/down and the overflow menu appears to the left.

After you select one tune, the box appears for everything in the list, while you get a bottom toolbar that lets you quickly Add to playlist and Play next. That overflow menu contains Add to playlist, Play next, and Add to queue.

Original 6/1: Some users are noticing that tracks in music.youtube.com list views now show a checkbox at the right (after thumbs up/down and the overflow menu). This presumably appears upon hovering over a song and remains visible after at least one selection is made.

YouTube Music will show a box at the bottom of your screen with options for adding to playlist or queue. There’s another overflow menu here as well.

So far, multi-select is only rolled out to a handful of users on the web. It remains to be seen whether the capability is also coming to the Android and iOS clients, which would possibly require more development effort than the web client. Long-pressing a song in the mobile apps is already used to launch the overflow menu.

Nevertheless, it’s progress that his feature exists anywhere, and the addition gives people at least one place to take bulk actions on their library. A wider launch of multi-select is hopefully coming sooner than later to YouTube Music.