YouTube Music- Why You Should Subscribe!

Originally written and shared on medium: https://medium.com/@brewing_writer/you-tube-music-why-you-should-subscribe-7f16f34871c0

YouTube launched a ‘One Month Free Trial’ for YouTube Music and here’s why you should subscribe immediately!

For someone whose official login time on her Mac is almost 60% of her day and even more — as good as my body’s requirement for hydration, the one tab that is always open on Safari is YouTube.

So this morning, on a bright sunny morning in beautiful Dublin, I woke up to this amazing banner on my YouTube Home Feed:

My immediate response was to click the “1 Month Free” tab to see exactly what is it that YouTube has brought to me with the YouTube Music.

YouTube has deifintely been the largest source of music, entertainment, knowledge sharing and self learning videos provider across the world. However, personally for me, YouTube has been the biggest source of music.

Any artist you name, any song you name, anything that is even remotely associated to music, even a cover, you search and you find a ‘video’ on YouTube. However, you do not necessarily always have the time and the feasibility to catch up on all the videos. Sometimes you do want to listen to a track which is not on Apple Music or SoundCloud or even on Spotify and then your only resort is YouTube.

Experiment: If YouTube Music has a similar collection as YouTube videos

Step 1: Go to your MindPalace and fetch the first morst favorite artist that comes to your mind- People who know my music choice will not be surprised when I present you my search with R?yksopp.

I was immediately listening to all my favorite tracks while of course writing this blog. BTW do check out the track Monument that is shown in the screenshot above! Stellar track :)

Anyway, coming back to our exploration; I decided to click on the track which took me to this page. But I wanted to explore more and hence I clicked the back button on my browser.

Ideally this would take me away from my YouTube video which was playing the music that wanted to listen to, hence limiting my experience of music to one screen.

However, when you click on the back, forward, search etc any of the buttons on YouTube Music you do not loose your track. See screenshot below:

Step 2: Let’s explore a few more artists and their tracks and see how YouTube Music guides us

You will find it quite interesting that when I searched for Tom Rosenthal, an English singer-songwriter and composer, I found a lot of his tracks in the YouTube Music Library.

I could however in this music list not find his very famous song ‘Go Solo’. Hence I had to search and fetch this as it is my personal favourite. Here’s what I got, a music video search result.

This is interesting because one might think- does a video mean this will take me to YouTube and I’ll no longer be on the YouTube Music page?

Let’s find out-

This is a screenrecording of the video playing on your YouTube Music page. So a new find is you can also watch videos on your YouTube Music page.

What happens to the video if you click the back button on your browser?

Your video goes into a preview mode while still giving you the ability to explore YouTube Music.

Step 3: Let’s now go back to the Home Page and see how the feed is influenced/ not influenced with my search choices.

Please note by this time I have searched for atleast three unique artists and listened to multiple tracks from their collection. I wanted to see if this influences the home feed on my YouTube Music page and hence I am sharing with you a screen recording of the home page.

If you see this recording my YouTube Music Library has already gathered intel from my previous searches for music and videos and is suggesting me similar artists and videos. As intuitive in the feed as YouTube and with more utilisation and search this gets smarter.

Quick Notes on Using YouTube Music

1. You can like dislike your music with similar like and dislike buttons
2. Just like a music player it allows you to repeat playlist, repeat track and repeat off
3. On the bottom right corner of your player you have a down arrow button which allows you to toggle the playlist on and off your current screen
4. If you are on the home screen and have a playlist on with the right bottom preview screen it allows you to either go full screen or go to the playlist with two distinct buttons.
5. Also allows you to add remove songs from liked lists and playlists etc just like any other music player. Here’s a screenshot:

6. It also instinctively give you new recommendations reading into your real time listening history

Any Drawbacks I Noticed?

Just one at the moment!

There is no button to close the preview even after you pause the song and are on the Home page.

If you remove the song from the queue it automatically jumps to the next song in queue and starts a new preview. This can be annoying when you want to get rid of the preview and start a whole new search or playlist or just spend time on the home screen without the preview annoying your space.

Oh and one more! Did you notice in the above screenshot that the dislike button is before the like button which is quite opposite to the YouTube videos. I’m wondering why oh why do you want me to end up clicking the dislike first out of force of habit only to realise I have to undo that and like it again. Interesting though!

Now go ahead on your own exploration & Enjoy YouTube Music. Don’t forget to bookmark https://music.youtube.com in your browser!

Please note: YouTube Music was launched in 17 countries this year including United States, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Russia, Austria, Finland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, and South Korea.