Google have been consistently rolling out the new features to YouTube Music for the past year but with the shuttering of Google Play Music looming at the end of the year the feature rollouts have increased in recent months. Overnight they have begun rolling out the ability to collaborate on a playlist and also AI features to help you build your own playlist.
The YouTube Music playlist collaboration feature has begun rolling out to “some” users globally on Android only at this stage but plans are for it to eventually roll out to all Android and iOS users. The feature allows you to collaborate with any other YouTube Music user (look out for my Scott/Ice Cube and Scott/Corey Taylor collabs coming soon!) and it is easy to use:
- After creating a playlist, simply navigate to the Edit page where you’ll see the new Collaborate button.
- Once activated, you can share the playlist with any other YouTube Music user, allowing them to add content as well.
As you can see below we already have the feature in our settings and it looks incredibly easy to use.
YouTube Music also has you covered in the creation of said playlists too with a new assistive playlist feature arriving today for all Android smartphone users. The new assistive playlist feature uses machine learning “to provide users and their collaborators relevant song recommendations for their playlists”. The recommendations it provides are based on not just existing songs in the playlist but also personalised “signals” such as history and likes. The feature can even help you start the playlist based on the name of the playlist alone.
This feature has not arrived on our devices just yet but a 9to5Google reader grabbed some screenshots on their app this morning:
Google must nearly be at a stage where they can safely shutter GPM without users losing many, if any, features when switching to YouTube Music. Of course there will be some small features still missing somewhere in the app but you can be sure Google are working on bringing all features over before the end of the year.
What features are missing in YouTube Music that you need?
Lots of gaps from GPM to YTM still:
– chromecast from web player
– gapless track switching via chromecast
– view of albums added to library from artist page (currently just shows all albums)
– playlist generated from Google home “play music” request is limited to the songs you’ve listened to in ytm rather than your listen history from gpm or any AI-lead recommendation