Let’s face it, YouTube Music, although is inferior to Play Music at this stage, is the future of Google’s music offerings. You may like it or not but if you want to stick to the Google ecosystem you are going to be stuck with it, and soon. Today Google have started rolling out a new interface to the Player Page in YouTube Music in a bid to continually keep improving it.
Starting today YouTube Music users will start seeing an all-new look to the interface on their Player Page start popping up. The new interface is designed to improve and enhance their experience through a better design and playback controls and also the introduction of lyrics along with other changes.
The new upgrade to the interface includes:
- Flipping between songs and videos in the app is now always visible on the player page to make it easy to move seamlessly between a song and its music video, a feature only offered by YouTube Music. Prior to the update it only surfaced if a song had a video.
- Static lyrics are being rolled out within the app, offering highly visible access to follow along to tracks. While still in experiment phase, this feature will continue to be developed.
- Playback control is more convenient with repeat and shuffle now located on the player page.
- Downloading, sharing and adding songs to playlists is now easier than ever with all three features accessible by tapping on album art.
This is yet another step in the right direction for YouTube Music and while many of you have told us that you have switched over to Spotify already some of us stay on here because we hate ads in YouTube so have the subscription for that anyway.
Feature parity with Google Play Music is required before a full switch to YouTube Music by Google and it is getting close. Last week we saw the new ability to upload your music, now we just need the migration of your entire library over and it would be very close to ready.
The new update is slowly rolling out to Android users in the coming weeks via what you would think would be a server-side switch. iOS users will receive their planned update “in the near future”.
These changes are yet to land on my YouTube Music but they will be definitely welcome — especially the continually present video button, and of course the lyrics so I can sing along at the top of my voice in the gym….
“now we just need the migration of your entire library over”… What about migrating all your thumbs up/downs? That’s really important for it to play new music that it thinks you might like.
What they need to fix is music uploads. Now that it’s live i uploaded some music files to test it out, only to find that there is no album view for uploaded music. There’s artists, but once you go inside that artist’s page there is no album view, just a seemingly never ending list of tracks – hardly what I would call user friendly, not to mention almost pointless. I just can’t for the life of me figure how this app is still so half baked …
They need to fix the buffering too, GPM seems to handle poor internet connection while commuting etc. really well whereas YTM is constantly buffering and pausing play.
I wish they’d fix their own licensing issues so I can finally switch over permanently. Some songs by artists with alternate profiles often get locked out in YTM but are available to listen to in both GPM and YouTube…