YouTube Music have made a subtle but noticeable change to its dark theme on web and Android clients. As reported by 9to5Google the small coloring change looks to provide a more unified experience.
It has been a turbulent year for YouTube Music and Google. Most of 2020 was spent on the migration from Google Play Music over to YouTube. This was originally plagued with a lot of issues over the time it took and some bugs experienced when users had migrated over.
This sparked YouTube Music into putting a lot of effort into improving its product. The company implemented a variety of new features to the platform. These include new filters for ‘Home’ feed suggestions amongst others.
Now things have settled down a touch it looks like Google has become increasingly interested in getting users to pay for the service. This has resulted in a greater push for users to upgrade their accounts on the platform.
This appears to be another subtle change from YouTube Music as the company looks to improve the product ever so slightly in an attempt to justify the price of upgrading.
YouTube Music makes a change to its dark theme
Previously, YouTube Music started off with a dark theme without a lighter counterpart. This is not the norm for Google Apps. However, a lighter grey color is also used by the app as well as the black palet.
However, where there was some grey on the dark theme has now found itself replaced with more black. This means the Android status bar has changed color to this darker theme.
The Library tab also looks different “Recent activity” carousel now looking very different. This is probably where it is at its most noticeable.
Generally, this means things like the Explore tab, as well as search and album/playlist pages, blend at the top of the page. This is where you can best see that YouTube was looking for a more unified experience that looks that bit cleaner.
Some have suggested that this more unified dark theme could lead to the app getting a light them somewhere along the line. The change made would make it much easier to invert the interface.
However, for now this is just rumors. With YouTube Music making lots of little changes over recent weeks and months it is hardly surprising that some more aesthetic UI alterations would follow. It will be worth keeping our ears to the ground to see if this change leads anywhere more substantial though.