YouTube is now reportedly rolling out an update to its dedicated Music app, delivering a new “Related” tab to the Now Playing interface. As its branding suggests, the new tabbed section is all about recommendations. More specifically, it’s all about surfacing content related to the audio that’s currently being played.
The company embedded the new UI at the bottom of the interface, next to the Up Next and Lyrics tabs. Once users navigate to the Related tab, that works similarly to how it does in Google Play Music — with a few updates.
To begin with, YouTube Music highlights five songs that are related to the current tune that users might also like. Just below that, there’s a swipeable list of “Recommended playlists” and that’s followed by a “Similar artists” section. Yet another segment below that is built to showcase other albums, singles, and EPs from the artist that’s currently playing.
Finally, users can learn about the artist in the “About the artist” segment. The segment acts as an up-to-date biography for the artist.
Not every song has all of those sections but, the interface is reminiscent of Google Play Music. So it falls more in line with other modern music streaming apps.
Google Play Music is dead, long live YouTube Music
Now, this is the second major UI update that YouTube Music has applied in recent months. The first brought the interface that’s being tweaked here. Namely, it puts all of the controls and features onto a single page, making it easier to interact without all of the extra clicks.
The update is also arriving just in time for a change in music streaming at Google. The company stopped providing major updates for Google Play Music some time ago.
That’s all part of the decision to move all media offerings under the YouTube branding. As a result, Google Play Music is going away. The company plans to kill it off by the end of the year. And the two Alphabet-owned companies are redirecting users to YouTube Music in the interim.
As noted above, this change effectively brings some of the former app’s popular features over.
In this case, that’s the discovery features aimed at helping users find similar music in just a couple of taps. The Google-branded music app displayed those as artist recommendations. For YouTube Music, that’s been updated to include a plethora of other suggestions. That’s as opposed to focusing on genre distinctions and musical eras.
This is already rolling out, no update required
None of that is to say this rollout will hit everybody at once. As is often the case, it will take days and possibly weeks for the changes to land across the board. But this shouldn’t be confined to any given version of Android. And users won’t need to download and install an update to the YouTube Music app either.
Instead, this is a server-side update. So the new YouTube Music “Related” should just show up automatically in the playback UI without the need for a manual update.