YouTube Music Launches Samples, a TikTok-Inspired Feed for Music Exploration
Over the past few years, nearly every significant platform has developed its own version of TikTok’s distinctive vertical video scrolling feed. The most recent addition to this trend is YouTube Music. Today, the app will introduce a vertical video feed called Samples, which YouTube claims is a convenient and efficient way to discover and sample new music with just a single tap.
The samples are located on a new tab at the bottom of the application next to the home feed, your library and the Explore section. Tapping Samples will automatically launch a short vertical video clip of a song YouTube Music thinks you’ll like. Naturally, it picks songs based on your taste profile, emphasizing artists you like and familiar ones you may not have heard before.
The app already has several playlists tuned to your listening habits, including Supermix, which brings together songs and artists across all your listening habits. There’s also a Discover playlist, which naturally focuses on things you’re unfamiliar with but might enjoy based on your history. YouTube Music product manager Gregor Dodson told ReturnByte that the algorithm for the Samples feed is slightly different from both of these — it tries to slot between the two playlists, highlighting artists you might be familiar with, but pulls clips you haven’t watched. before.
The clips you see in Samples are only 30 seconds long, but that’s enough to give you an idea of the song. If it’s not what you’re looking for, just swipe up and go to another song, and you can do this as much as you want. Spotify recently added its own vertical video feed, but it’s less for searching and more for a way to quickly scroll through song previews on its playlists. But with both Spotify and YouTube Music implementing something new like this, it seems likely that we’ll see more apps do the same soon.
I got to try Samples a few days before its release, and the most interesting part was using it as a jumping-off point for a longer listening session, which Dodson confirmed was planned. “Short-form video [and] infinite scrolling have really interesting applications in music discovery,” he said. “It’s a simple way to discover new music, but it’s not the end of the journey – it’s just the beginning of discovering a new artist or song.”
To do this, the Samples video view is covered with several controls. You can save a song to your “liked songs” playlist by tapping your thumb anywhere on the sample. You can also save the song to any playlist you’ve created. Between these two options, it’s pretty easy to quickly scroll through samples and save a bunch of tracks for viewing. And if you hear something you want to play in full right away, just tap the big old play button in the corner of the screen.
Since this is YouTube we’re talking about, there’s also a “Shorts” button that takes you to the main YouTube app. It will show you other Shorts clips created with your chosen voice and you can jump into making your own clip from the song. Finally, the share button does exactly what you think it does – you get a link that can drop into tons of other apps like Messages, Reddit, Facebook, and whatever else you have installed.
In the overflow menu, you’ll find many other options, such as starting a continuous radio station from the song, jumping to the artist’s page to find more music, saving the song to your library, and so on. I featured the “start radio” button more prominently in the Samples video, as I found it to be a great way to jump into an automatically generated set of songs that have the same vibe as the sample that originally caught my eye (and ear).
My biggest problem with Samples is the user interface. More specifically, it’s not always clear where exactly you end up in the app when you switch views. Tapping the Samples tab will start scrolling the video, and you can tap one of the other bottom navigation tabs to exit. Tapping the play button opens the familiar YouTube Music player controls. Finally, swiping back down to hide the player interface takes you back to the samples. Seems pretty clear. But at one point I had pressed play to hear the song and turned my phone to landscape to see the video in full screen. When the next song started, I flipped my phone back to landscape, and the app immediately threw me back into the Samples view, with the clip of the song I’d already heard still playing.
The second time I started playing the song, I hit the switch at the top of the Play screen to turn off the video and just listen to the song. I listened to a few more songs from the automatically generated similar music station, then swiped down to hide the Now Playing interface and browse the app. I was thrown back to the sample view again. It makes logical sense, because that’s where the whole listening experience started. But I got used to being able to hide the Now Playing screen and scroll through the app while playing music, which was a little annoying. I could then hit the “Home” tab at the bottom and continue playing. It works, but adding samples changes some of the expected functionality of the app.
Excluding these quirks, Samples seems like a pretty handy addition to the YouTube Music app. Over the few days I got to test it, it consistently offered music from artists I liked, and the track selections were really things I wasn’t usually familiar with. From a video clip standpoint, it doesn’t really matter to me, but considering how many artists are making excellent videos these days, it’s fun to remember that these visuals are sometimes worth watching. (Thank you, YouTube Music, for playing Phoebe Bridgers’ “I Know the End” video.) Most importantly, it served well as a jumping-off point when I discovered some artists I’d forgotten about or found a tune to set the mood for a playlist or station.
YouTube says the Samples feature is rolling out globally today for both Android and iOS users. Like most new features, it might not hit your app right away, so you might have to be a little patient.
