YouTube Music makes sense in a world where our enjoyment is entirely determined by algorithms. After all, YouTube has long been associated with online entertainment, serving as a hub for music discovery and artist discovery. Even if it meant discontinuing Google Play Music, it seemed sensible to use this powerful brand for a specialized music service.
However, Google made several errors during the move, and because Google Podcasts is the next service to be moved to YouTube Music, the business must demonstrate that it has learned from its errors.
What is a YouTube podcast? (The popularity of podcasts)
Let’s start by discussing podcasts. Podcasts are a very popular media that cover a wide range of topics, including entertainment and news. Research by Edison Research states that almost half of Americans frequently listen to podcasts. That is a sizable population alone in the US.
An early podcast was released in 2003 under the name IT Conversations, hosted by Doug Kaye. Originally, it functioned on RSS feeds maintained on a blog, akin to how the New England Patriots operated a podcast on the internet. The ability to download episodes to an iPod lets IT Conversations stand out from other media entirely.
As additional shows appeared, Apple embraced the concept and in 2005 established a dedicated Podcast category on iTunes. From that point on, podcasts have only grown in popularity; the rest is history.
Do you recall Google Play Music? It was a very user-friendly music streaming service that was smooth and dependable. Back in 2012, I started using it as my first streaming service and uploaded all of my MP3 collection there. The original idea behind the service was to act as a digital locker for your music, which you could stream from any location. Back then, you could compare it to an iPod in the cloud—minus the podcasts, of course.
When Google Play Music All Access was introduced in 2013, the service was rapidly expanded. You may access a vast collection of millions of songs, playlists, and albums with this $9.99 per month subscription. Google attempted to create a music streaming service akin to Spotify, and it was fantastic because of its beautiful user interface and recommendations.
Google added podcasts to the service in 2016, just three years later. Back then, I was unaware of it since it was challenging to locate a podcast on the bewildering library menu. It seems as though Google wished to keep the addition of podcasts to the service a secret. I don’t believe I used the Google Play Music app to listen to any podcasts. Then, in 2018, Google introduced Google Podcasts. Two Google-owned podcast apps appeared out of nowhere, but only one of them was designed with podcasts in mind.
The writing was clearly on the wall for the former Google Play Music, which once again maintained a strict division between music and podcasts until Google released YouTube Music in 2019. Let’s first discuss the disastrous switch from Play Music to YouTube Music.
What went wrong with the move to Google Play Music
Simultaneously with the release of YouTube Music, Google announced the death of Google Play Music. There were differing responses. At the time, YouTube Music had a far smaller feature set, and some of those regressions are still present today. It had a far different navigation system that required some getting accustomed to, provided fewer artists, made library navigation more difficult, and connected too closely with YouTube through shared history and playlists. Even now, accessing your uploaded music—which exists independently of the streaming library—remains more difficult.
Although most users of the service now find it satisfactory, many believe that Google hurried the changeover and only improved YouTube Music when its former Google Play Music users could no longer ignore the app. At the time, Apple Music was stealing significant portions of the streaming market, and the majority of individuals were already using Spotify. For those like me, however, who had been using the service for years and had their whole music collection—including uploaded tracks—there, it was challenging.
To be fair, not everything about Google Play Music was fantastic. To begin with, I could stream audio without advertisements using Google Play Music All Access (a truly monstrous term), but my favorite music videos were on YouTube, which required an additional subscription at first. Google Podcasts was offered without charge. If you wanted to enjoy listening to music and other audio content using Google services, you could use those three separate apps. The issue is that a lot of people still have positive memories of Google Play Music. Google’s poor handling of the changeover is primarily to blame for this.
Google had been treating podcasts like stepmothers all that time. Even though podcasts have been around for more than ten years, the corporation seems caught off guard by the medium’s explosive growth. It didn’t appear to know how to handle them because it buried them in Play Music and then offered a different application. A lot of podcasters also ended up posting their episodes to YouTube so that people could just listen to them there, but in the past, you couldn’t use YouTube to simply listen to an RSS podcast.
Instructions for podcasts on YouTube Music
In September 2023, Google announced that Google Podcasts would close and move over to YouTube Music. In April 2024, the stand-alone podcast app will be discontinued. Google can learn a few things from the demise of Play Music and Google Podcasts, which can help increase the popularity of podcasts on YouTube Music.
First and foremost, the business must guarantee a seamless changeover process. Users should have immediate access to all of the features and controls found in the Podcasts app when Google Podcasts closes down. Power-user features like preferred listening speeds for particular podcasts are included in this.
Although YouTube Music appears to be headed in the right direction, there are still several elements that it lacks as of right now. There are just a few preset listening speed settings available, no option to automatically cut quiet, no way to mark episodes as watched, several granular download options, and no direct RSS feed subscription (though the latter is promised to come).
With only a few months remaining, Google has limited time to address this lengthy list of features, of which that is just a selection.
For another, the most crucial aspect of the user experience must be discovery.
For a lot of folks, Spotify performs this well. But Spotify isn’t the sole rival of YouTube Music. Several stand-alone podcast applications have a clear user interface and excellent exploration; curiously, Google Podcasts is one of the most streamlined and elegant. Google must guarantee that finding podcasts on YouTube Music is as effortless as it is on all other platforms, such as Google Podcasts.
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It won’t function if it buries them in an unclear mess, like with Google Play Music. For this reason, the YouTube Music UI for podcasts needs to be distinct from that of music. You may get a broad sense of the kind of music a song or playlist will sound like by looking at the cover art. A brief peek at a thumbnail lets you decide whether to browse past it or give it some more attention. Podcasts are a unique kind of media. A lot of them are in-depth talks about challenging political, technological, or historical topics.
They require space for their titles to appear along with a brief explanation remark. The podcast episode’s title seems to be a big draw for YouTube Music, drawing me in to listen to it. I found the Google Podcasts app from earlier to be much more helpful as it allowed for a few lines of text to be added to each episode
The podcast area of Spotify is always changing. These days, a lot of thumbnails play videos with subtitles that scroll across the bottom to help provide a preview of the podcast’s possible subject matter. The podcast episode has a brief text description next to it as well. I wouldn’t object if Google used one of these concepts for the YouTube Music podcast area.
The podcast episode’s title seems to be a big draw for YouTube Music, drawing me in to listen to it. I found the Google Podcasts app from earlier to be much more helpful as it allowed for a few lines of text to be added to each episode. The podcast area of Spotify is always changing. These days, a lot of thumbnails play videos with subtitles that scroll across the bottom to help provide a preview of the podcast’s possible subject matter. The podcast episode has a brief text description next to it as well. I wouldn’t object if Google used one of these concepts for the YouTube Music podcast area.
podcasts on YTM make sense,
and Google should integrate podcasts and music on YouTube. Similar to music, podcasts are currently available on YouTube for both producers and listeners. Now that the server infrastructure is in place, YouTube creators can even publish their RSS feeds. As part of its effort to eliminate duplication in its product selection, Google eventually decided that Google Play Music and Google Podcasts were unnecessary.
Can YouTube Music, however, hold its own against dozens of stand-alone podcast apps and Spotify? In the end, this is up to Google. For a reasonable monthly fee, YouTube Premium provides both ad-free YouTube videos and YouTube Music, making it an excellent value. YouTube Music, which now features podcasts, has a decent chance of succeeding if Google can stay with it for the long run.