9to5Google Log Out: YouTube Music is a laid back podcasts app

Abner Li | May 2 2023 - 12:00 pm PT

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Podcasts naturally flourished on YouTube without any real intervention by Google, and the company is only now working to optimize the experience. It somewhat demonstrates how YouTube’s distribution, reach, and recommendation algorithms can be applied to everything from videos to Shorts and now long-form audio.

I previously said YouTube Music is a streaming app for the YouTube generation that’s content with ceding their queue to Up Next and enjoys hearing songs recorded by concert attendees, which might have far from perfect quality, as much as the actual recorded version. I’d summarize this trait as casualness.

That casualness is definitely apparent in YouTube Music’s podcasts experience. In terms of the actual listening experience, the basics are there: 10-sec rewind/30-sec skip (customizable increments would be nice but are not crucial), playback speed controls, and sleep timer.

In terms of episode management, you get the ability to “Save episode for later,” “Add to playlist,” queuing options, and downloading. One feature that I, as a continued user of Pocket Casts and Google Podcasts, think YTM is wild for lacking is “mark as played.” Instead, you just have to naturally finish an episode, which, of course, works for the vast majority of people, or move the playback scrubber to the end. (Then again, it’s not like there’s an equivalent feature in the YouTube app.)

[Aside: I’m excited for some sort of native advertising experience where podcasters mark ideal locations for ads and YouTube places them so that YouTube Premium can remove them for paying subscribers. I’m not sure if the economics of that works out. Another idea, which would be more direct, is a YouTube Channel Membership that unlocks ad-free versions of podcasts.]

In all, YouTube Music is a basic podcasts app, with Google instead prioritizing discovery features. The “Related” tap in Now Playing for songs works with podcasts. These capabilities will be really attractive to podcasters and a big incentive to upload audio as videos or even record themselves in the studio and upload that.

On that note, YouTube really needs to add an RSS option, which in theory is already in place from Google Podcasts. So many of the more traditional podcasters are not yet on YouTube and might stubbornly refuse the extra YouTube overhead until something more streamlined is in place.

This is very much YouTube’s first stab at a podcasts app, and it’s only available in one country. In building a product, it’s easier to start out with something simple and then introduce extra complexity.