YouTube Music launches Reels-like feed to help you discover new music

YouTube Music's Samples tab is a personalised feed of short clips from music videos that match your taste.

Swipe through short clips of songs and videos to find your new favorite tune. (Image: YouTube)

Listen to this article

00:00

1x 1.5x 1.8x

The vertical video format is taking over the internet after TikTok’s success and many popular platforms have introduced it to their apps over the past few years. The latest to join the fray is now YouTube Music. The music streaming platform will soon allow users to browse a new ‘Samples’ tab that will pull short clips from YouTube’s massive catalogue of music videos and display them in an endless vertically scrolling feed on the app.

The Samples tab is rolling out to users globally starting today and if you’ve received the update, you’ll see a new button sitting at the bottom of the YouTube Music app on mobile. Tapping it will lead you to a feed of short video clips that showcase different songs and artists from the YouTube Music library.

YouTube says that the point of this new feed is to make “music discovery fun and effortless.” You can swipe through the clips to find your next favourite song. The platform also says that the Samples tab is personalised for you, based on your preferences and listening history.

Each clip gives you a taste of the song and the video, so you can get a sense of what it’s like before you decide to listen more. You can also see some information about the artist and the album, as well as the number of views and likes.

Also read | Google Photos will soon use generative AI to make your memories more fun

If you like what you hear, you can easily access more features to enhance your music experience. You can add the song to your collection, share it with your friends, create a playlist, start a radio station, watch the full video, or even make your own Short with the song.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen vertical video make it to a non-social media platform to drive content discovery. Netflix has the ‘New & Hot’ section that shows clips from popular new shows and movies so that you can decide what to put on for your next binge-watch session. Meanwhile, Spotify is actually planning to go a step further than YouTube and was reportedly testing a vertically-scrolling video feed that would replace its current homepage.