Give Whimsy Back to YouTube Music

Abner Li | Mar 5 2024 - 1:05 pm PT

YouTube Music is my streaming service of choice followed by Apple Music. Music is important to both companies given YouTube’s role in music videos and the iPod, but it’s far from the core business.

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I like YTM for the Up Next algorithm that’s responsible for the vast majority of my new music discovery and the library of songs covers and live performances uploaded to YouTube is simply unmatched. (I have not been using the YouTube Music Samples tab at all since it launched last August. The curated, artist-only nature should make way for those aforementioned covers and live renditions. Alternatively, I could see that dedicated tab being swapped out with something else in the future now that we have a Samples carousel in the Home feed.)

Meanwhile, I have years of purchased albums – which I continue to still do for posterity – in what was previously called iTunes.

I’m perfectly happy with the YouTube Music app as it exists today. It has my favorite Now Playing UI and I’m content with how the Home feed surfaces songs to listen to. Meanwhile, I’m willing to give YouTube Podcasts a try once it is feature complete.

Both services do everything I personally want from a music app, but that’s it.

When I look at Spotify, the functionality available outside of the core music experience just looks fun:

It’d describe it as whimsy, a trait associated with early Google. If any product would benefit from a dose of fun, it’s a music player.

I am envious of the focus that Spotify can commit to the music experience since that’s the entire point of the company. Meanwhile, other features like Rewind are much richer, while they move faster on adding new features.

That said, a product like YTM can take advantage of Google’s vast cloud infrastructure to the latest AI models. It also gets to benefit from being included in any all-in-one subscriptions, like Apple One and – to a lesser degree – YouTube Premium for ad-free videos on the main site. (I seriously doubt YouTube Premium ever comes to Google One without you basically paying the full price for it.)

One place we could get whimsy from YouTube Music is generative AI. There’s custom album covers today, but I’m waiting for a conversational experience that will let me enter a prompt and get a custom playlist. Another fun feature would be searching by describing a song as you would to another person, though YTM’s existing search feature is already pretty close.