YouTube Music with comments is Google’s low-key social network

Abner Li | Sep 29 2023 - 1:00 pm PT

“A social network for music” is how Steve Jobs described iTunes Ping in September 2010. I still think it’s a good idea that has the chance of being realized at scale by YouTube Music and its new ability to access comments directly on the Now Playing screen.

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In redesigning that UI to elevate key actions several weeks ago, a single tap on Android and iOS now lets you slide up a comments panel that’s taken straight from the main YouTube app.

Google has a complicated history with social networks, like Buzz (chasing Twitter) and, of course, Google+ (Facebook). The last attempt had problems but had a handful of good core ideas. One of those was the idea of Circles, or topic-based communities.

I think if Google made a social network in the modern era it would center around that premise. I’m essentially thinking of the Reddit model rather than a massive and singular feed.

While I think the opportunity for the company to pursue a social network has passed, I think it accidentally stumbled into one with YouTube Music comments.

It’s for people that want to discuss music; be it the lyrics, sound, what a tune means to them, reminiscing, where (movie or TV show) they heard it recently, etc. Meanwhile, concert recordings can be used to discuss live shows and what not.

A song is the pre-set topic that’s focused and specific with equally natural discussion thread discovery. Meanwhile, comments can also be powerful if more podcasts move over with the ability to associate comments with specific timestamps being handy.

Meanwhile, the other big social network aspects of YouTube Music are the user-generated playlists surfaced in the Home feed with a “From the community” carousel/shelf and the ability to view the Channel of the creator to find other playlists, as well as see their public stats of top recent listens by songs, videos, artists, and playlists.

In the future, it would be interesting to see YouTube Music add the ability to comment directly on an album or playlist for broader commentary.

That social aspect and the comment section is already possible without any work from YouTube. I’m not sure if a full-blown social network is a direction they want to pursue (like being able to see comments made by people you follow in a central feed or letting you write posts), but the foundation is here regardless, and I think it has a lot of potential to be an interesting community and space.