YouTube Music has a TikTok-like ‘Samples’ tab to help you find new music
YouTube Music is launching a new TikTok-style short-form personalized video feed called “Samples,” the company announced on Monday.
Each clip in the feed offers a glimpse into the artist, music video, and feel of a song recommended to you. As with TikTok and other copycat short-form video feeds, users can swipe vertically in the new Samples feed to discover songs and music videos.
In an interview with WIRED, Gregor Dodson spoke about the new feature and what the company hopes to achieve with its TikTok-esque feed.
He’s upfront about how the feed is designed to engage younger listeners who scroll through quick videos on social media and see it as a way to find something fresh.
Samples live in a new tab at the bottom of the app, alongside the home feed, your library, and the explore section. Tapping Samples automatically starts a short vertical video clip of a song that YouTube Music thinks you'll like.
Naturally, it's pulling songs based on your taste profile, with an emphasis on artists that you like, and related ones who you might not have heard before.
The app already has multiple playlists that are tuned to your listening habits, including a Supermix that pulls songs and artists together across all your listening habits.
Brandon Bilinski said, “One of the biggest insights we’ve seen over the past couple of years is that all users, but especially younger users, are discovering more and more music through short-form video,” Bilinski said. “Friends and family is always number one. If you ask people how they discover music, they always say friends and family, but just recently short-form video climbed into a close number two. We sort of took that insight and we decided to make a discovery-focused, short-form video experience solely focused around music.”
So, in other words, YouTube Music is using short-form video clips to promote the discovery of long-form video content on the platform, while also helping users discover new music.
When swiping through the feed, users can add a song to their collection, share it with others, create a playlist, visit the album page, kick off a new radio station, or use the song to create a Short.
Because songs go viral on TikTok through dances or skits or reaction videos, the 30- or 60-second chunk of a track that goes viral is almost always the catchiest bit of the song.
There's also a Discover playlist that, naturally, focuses on things you're not familiar with but might enjoy based on your history.
Spotify added its own vertical video feed recently, but that's less for discovery and more to offer a way to quickly scroll through previews of songs in its playlists.
But with both Spotify and YouTube Music implementing such new features, it seems likely that we'll see more apps do the same soon.
Since this is YouTube we're talking about, there's also a "Shorts" button that pops you into the main YouTube app. It'll show you other Shorts clips created with the audio you picked and let you jump into making your own clip with the song.
Finally, the share button does just what you'd think — you get a link that can drop into a host of other apps like Messages, Reddit, Facebook, and whatever else you might have installed.
The music subscription app is available individually or bundled with YouTube Premium, which also includes access to an ad-free experience on YouTube proper.
YouTube Music plans to explore how this type of short-form discovery can be incorporated into other parts of the app and looks to roll out new experiences that make it easy to discover new artists and their music.
YouTube says that the Samples feature is rolling out globally starting today for both Android and iOS users. As with most new features, it might not hit your app immediately, so you might need to be a little patient.
The new Samples tab is beginning to roll out today to YouTube Music users on both iOS and Android globally.