YouTube Music rolling out collaborative playlists with ML song suggestions

Abner Li | Jul 21 2020 - 12:44 pm PT

As we’ve been tracking for the past several weeks, YouTube Music will soon let you create collaborative playlists with others. Additionally, the Google streaming service is providing machine learning-powered song suggestions.

Once rolled out, all your YouTube Music playlists will feature a “Collaborate” button on the edit screen for renaming, adding a description, and setting privacy. Users will be provided a link to share, and afterwards others can add songs to the playlist. Each contribution will be accompanied by the name of the person responsible for submitting.

Collaborative music playlists — long found on the full YouTube video service — is initially rolling out on Android today, with iOS devices following.

Meanwhile, individual and group playlists will benefit from song recommendations. As we spotted this morning, users will see a “Suggestions” section at the bottom of every playlist that provides a handful of tunes with a quick “add” button. YouTube Music is leveraging machine learning to provide “relevant song recommendations.”

Google explains how the feature looks at existing songs, as well as your listening history, while even playlist titles are enough to provide suggestions:

Recommendations are based on the existing songs in the playlist as well as personalized signals such as watch history and likes. Even if the playlist is empty, this feature can provide song recommendations simply based on the playlist name!

Google tells us that this is again first rolling out on Android via a server-side update. Over the past few hours, more users have encountered the feature.