Let’s admit it, the world is converging into one giant TikTok feed. Several applications have adopted their vertically scrolling video feed, and YouTube Music is the next one to follow suit. Just recently, YouTube Music rolled out its Samples feature last year, and now they’re showing up on the home screen. It’s like watching YouTube Shorts but on YouTube Music.
YouTube Music, along with YouTube Premium are actually doing pretty well now. The company announced that it crossed 100 million users across YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. That’s a pretty surprising figure, seeing as YouTube has been going through a bit of a controversy surrounding ad blockers and increasing its prices. One thing to note is that this number includes active free trials going on. So, a section of the 100 million people aren’t actually paying for YouTube premium.
YouTube music rolls out is TikTok-style Samples feature
Trying to count how many services are implementing some sort of TikTok-style feed, it’s tempting to bring up that Vegeta “It’s over 9,000” meme. In all honesty, The TikTok-style feed seems to be the most popular and efficient way of displaying content. More social media platforms and video streaming platforms are adopting the portrait video-friendly interface. Famously, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat all brought their own vertically scrolling interfaces in order to combat TikTok
Well, a latecomer to the game is YouTube Music. The company just rolled out its new Samples feature. On your home screen, just scroll down a bit until you see the horizontally scrolling feed. When you tap on it, you will see a YouTube Shorts interface with clips of music videos in portrait mode. Since music videos are recorded in landscape, you will definitely see much of the action cropped out. However, these aren’t meant to be for viewing full videos. Samples are meant to give you a taste of some of the music you may be missing out on.
Using Samples, it’s easy to see that the selection of Samples you get is based on your watch history. However, there’s always the chance you’d run into some music that doesn’t fit your taste. For example, my musical taste consists of acts from the ’60s like The Bee Gees and The Turtles to the ’90s consisting of acts like TLC and Debbie Gibson with a ton of classical music thrown in. However, I’d sometimes run into modern pop and rap songs.
This could just be YouTube Music trying to push more modern popular music, as that’s where most of its viewership comes from. However, skipping them is only a swipe away. Also, they don’t pop up too often. So, you’ll see most of the music that you listen to on a daily basis. Along with songs you listen to, it will show you other songs in the same vein of your music tastes that you can discover.
Using YouTube Samples
The interface is very reminiscent of YouTube Shorts. So, on the interface, you will see a column of buttons on the right side of the screen. You have the Like, Add to playlist, and Share buttons.
There’s also a Shorts button. This will take you to the YouTube app proper and show you any YouTube Shorts that use this particular song. Below that, there’s a Play button. It will take you to the full song on YouTube Music. Under those buttons, you will have your three-dot menu with remaining options such as the Start Radio, Play Next, Add to queue, Download, Go to artist, and Report buttons.
Single-tapping the screen will pause the video, and double-tapping it will like it. Unfortunately, he cannot scrub the video. If you want to restart it or go back, you will have to wait for it to replay.
2024-02-04 15:05:25