Four New Features Coming to YouTube Music

This November marks 10 years since YouTube launched its own music service. While YouTube Music isn't as widely discussed as other streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify, it's a massively popular choice, withover 125 million subscribers-when you include theYouTube Premiumusers that get the service as part of their subscription, that is.

To mark 10 years of YouTube Music, the company is adding four new features for both free and paid users. These aren't as monumental as you might expect for a 10-year anniversary update, but there are some interesting changes here to check out.

Taste match playlists

YouTube doesn't share many details about this new feature, but the press release does say this: Taste match playlists are designed to introduce new music to groups of people with similar interests. The playlists update daily based on whoever has subscribed to them.

This could be an interesting way to crowdsource new music. Rather than add new music manually, the listening histories of the users of each playlist inform the algorithm, which adds new music accordingly.

Bandsintown integration

For this update, YouTube announced a partnership with Bandsintown, a site that helps you find new music playing in your area. When users watch a music video, a Short, or an Artist Channel, this new integration will let them know when the artist is playing near them. You can also get notifications when artists release new music, merch, and event dates.

New badges for music videos

"Badges" are like awards for achieving certain goals or feats on YouTube. Since last year, you may have seen badges for "First to Watch" and "Top Listener."

YouTube is now rolling out new badges, specifically for music videos. Now, artists can earn badges for "view milestones." For example, if the artist gets 100,000, one million, or one billion views, they'll get badges in return. It's not clear if fans get badges for contributing to these view counts, or if they just apply to the artist's page.

Comments on albums and playlists (coming soon)

YouTube is teasing the ability to add comments on albums and playlists, similar to how you can comment on music videos. The company hasn't shared a timeline for when this feature will drop, however.

As a reminder, YouTube Music is available as a free service on iOS, Android, and the web. You can subscribe to YouTube Music for $10.99 per month, or get it as part of a YouTube Premium subscription for $13.99 per month.