YouTube Music Getting Assistive and Collaborative Playlists

Jul. 22, 2020

YouTube Music has reportedly started rolling out the ability to let users collaborate on playlists. With this addition,users will see a “Collaborate” buttonnext to the playlist’s privacy controls.

To collaborate on playlists, all you have to do iscreate a playlist and tap on the Edit button(pencil icon) to access the feature. You can then share the playlist with your loved ones and they will have the option to add new songs too.

The collaborative playlist feature is currentlyrolling out to some YouTube Music users on Android. The company is planning to make a wider rollout to all Android and iOS users soon. It was not live on my phone when I checked.Image: 9to5Google

Alongside collaborative playlists, the company isalso implementing a new assistive playlist feature. According to the company, the feature makes use of machine learning to provide users and collaborators relevant song recommendations.

While the recommendations will be primarily based on the existing songs in the playlists, it will also take watch history and likes of users into consideration. YouTube Music claims that the featurewould even provide song recommendations based on the playlist’s title.

To test that out, I tried creating two playlists with generic names – Happy and Duh. As you can see in the image above, the recommendations seem to be relevant to the title. I also quite loved the fact that ‘bad guy -Billie Eilish’ is one of the suggestions in the Duh playlist.

Unlike collaborative playlists, this one iswidely rolling out to all Android usersthrough a server-side change. However, iOS users may have to wait for a while to get their hands on it. If you’re not seeing the feature, make sure your YouTube Music app is updated to the latest version.

Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.