If you were going to
reinvent MTV for a mobile generation, you'd probably come up with something
like YouTube Music. It's a video-first music service that also plays in the
background like you'd expect a music app to do. That sets it apart from other
music apps out there, many of which give you a choice of videos or songs, but
not interchangeably.
The
YouTube Music app is free for iPhone and for Android.
When you
first launch YouTube Music, you will need to log into your Google account and
opt in for the 14-day free trial of YouTube Red, which you and then extend
another month in YouTube Music's settings.
But
while YouTube Music offers a lot of interesting features, most of them require
a subscription to the new YouTube Red service, which will set you back $10 a
month -- $13 if you sign up through YouTube's iPhone app. Without Red, YouTube
Music will play ads similar to what you see on YouTube proper, and several
other functions won't work at all.
YouTube Music is first
and foremost a music-video app, albeit one that doesn't forget that most people
will be using it on their phones. For those times you'd rather just listen
instead of watching, you can hit a toggle that switches the app to audio-only
mode, which turns off the video playback and swaps in a still image. You can
even turn off the screen and keep listening while you do something else.
YouTube Music is far
less cluttered than competing services like Apple Music, which has more lists
and tabs than you'll know what to do with. YouTube Music keeps the tabs to
three -- home, hot (trending videos), and thumbs up (your favorites).
Home offers recommended
videos, and it's easy to find something playable. Your mileage may vary with
the "hot" tab; it didn't do much for me, although I'm usually a bit
out of sync with the mainstream.
Finally, there's one
more fun feature, which is called "offline mixtape." It automatically
saves 20 audio-only songs for you based on your tastes, for when you know
you're going to get spotty reception. I wish it saved the videos instead of just
the audio, but this will keep the tunes turning in a pinch. Alas, offline
mixtapes are disabled in the ad-supported version of YouTube Music.
When you
are listening to a song, you'll see the video playing in a box in the top half
of your screen. Rotate your screen to landscape to view in fullscreen. When in
portrait mode, you'll see Playing Now and Explore tabs. Playing Now shows
information about the video and shows the next five songs in the playlist
YouTube Music generated, which it calls a station.
Also on
the Now Playing tab, you'll find like and dislike buttons for the video
currently playing along with a like button just below those for the station the
app created. Next to the like button for the station is a slider-controls
button that provides a slider to adjust the station variety, from less variety
to balanced to more variety. If you are listening to a playlist from the
trending tab, the station variety slider button is replaced by a shuffle
button.
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