For the longest time, YouTube Music has been playing catch up with streaming apps like Spotify and Apple Music. Now, with short videos and music discovery on TikTok blowing up, Google has decided to take them on with a cool new YouTube Music feature. Dubbed Samples, YouTube Music has gained a new feature that can potentially change the way you discover new music. Keep reading to find out how.
Discover New Music with YouTube Samples Tab
In an official blog post, YouTube announced the Samples feature for its music streaming app. It will be accessible via a dedicated tab in the YouTube Music app on Android and iOS. It lives between the “Home” tab and “Explore” tabs. The blog post describes the Samples feature as “a seamless feed of short-form video segments to get you to your new favorite music.”
The Samples tab is curated based on your listening habits and powered by the music videos catalog on YouTube. These recommendations will range from legacy artists and music to up-and-coming musical sensations. As soon as you move to the Samples tab, you will be greeted with a small snippet of a song that will showcase a distinct section of the song to let you know how it sounds, its genre, the artist, and the contents of the music video. And the song recommendation will change each time you open the Samples tab or the YouTube Music app.
If you like the recommended “sample,” you can easily like it, add it to your playlist, share it, and even directly play it. All of these functionalities rest in a vertical position on the right side. You can even see what YouTube Shorts are being created with the song. There is a dedicated “Shorts” button that you can click to be redirected to the YouTube app.
There’s More to YouTube Samples than Just Snippets!
See the three horizontal dots at the bottom of the Play icon? When you tap it, you can additionally start a radio based on that song. In this way, not only have you discovered a new song but have found 24 additional songs that have the same genre and vibe.
Apart from this, you can use the three horizontal dots to head over to the next song, add the current song to your queue, save it to your library, download the song for offline listening (only for Premium subscribers), go to the artist profile, and even when required report the snippet.
Are YouTube Samples the New TikTok?
Now, if the new “Samples” tab reminds you of TikTok, you are not alone. The YouTube Samples feature is basically inspired by TikTok. It has the same vertical swipe feature to interact with the next and previous videos. It’s not surprising that the platform with the most music videos is trying out a TikTok-style interface, given the popularity of short videos worldwide. However, it’s important to note that YouTube Shorts already exists and is a much more accurate representation of TikTok in my opinion. So, with Samples, Google is now offering you the ability to interact with short-duration videos on both the main YouTube app as well as the YouTube Music app.
That being said, the Samples tab is now available to YouTube Music users globally on both Android and iOS. In case the feature is not yet live for you, make sure to update to the latest version of the app. So, go ahead and discover your next favorite tune with YouTube Music’s Samples.
