YouTube Music rolling out Now Playing redesign with comments

limerod@reddthat.commod to Android@lemdro.id – 97 points –
YouTube Music starts rolling out Now Playing redesign that adds comments
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I definitely don't want to see how many people like a song I'm listening to or what they have to say about it. I want my music experience to be more personal. I will just go to normal YouTube if I want to discuss something.

Ugh, I still miss GPM so much. YTM is worse to me in just about every way.

I mean I get why they're doing it, they're trying to make the UX more akin to Youtube and then, further into the future, Youtube Shorts.

Modern media sales is all 0-attention-span instant-engagement with as little actual content as possible. Hence why instead of reading a joke and laughing about it, people will watch a short video about some guy reading off the line then laughing about it for you. Which is just wild to me, and all the time having his head in the way of actually being able to read the line he has on screen.

And now it's bleeding into music UX design, which is even worse because by its nature, audio content of either type (story or art, or both) is not the same as video content. No matter how little content the video even has.

It's sad that music UX is adopting these principles, tbh. Music is inherently a long(er) form experience. It deserves separate treatment. The last thing I personally want is for music apps to try to suck my attention as much as text- and video-based apps do. I know I'm fighting against the app economy headwinds in that desire, but I still dare to dream...

They had it so right with GPM. I wish they had gave more shits about it. I even paid for that shit because it was good enough to remind me of the old days of using foobar to listen to music.

I just recently left YTM for Tidal and have been really enjoying the scaled-back lack of algorithmic social BS. Tidal is about the music and the artists, almost none of the social stuff and algorithms that try to get you to spend every waking moment on the app. I have the same issue with Spotify. They have a live sharing feature, but you can turn it off so that you don't see any of it.

It's like if you had a music player for just the music files you own, but it's streaming.

I'm absolutely done with YTM and all its bullshit.

I'll have to check it out. How is Tidal for music discovery? I found that GPM was great for helping me find artists with the "I'm feeling lucky" feature. YTM hasn't scratched that itch.

Part of what's kept me on YTM is that I'm still grandfathered into the GPM pricing, and I really like the ad-free feature for the rare occasions I am on YouTube. But—I could deal with giving that up!

Different guy, but I jumped from GPM to Plex/Tidal back when GPM died. While I mostly listen to my own files via Plex, the Tidal integration and it's playlists are most of what I use for discovery now, and my only complaint is that it doesn't integrate into the Plex/Plexamp apps like the bulk of the library does.

There's a "Daily Discovery" playlist that mixes new (to you) artists + new (to you) tracks from artists already in the library, a "New Arrivals" list for new (to exist) releases from artists you listen to, and ~5 rotating mixes based on artists you've listened to lately. I find the latter to be the closest to GPM's "I'm feeling lucky" though. They're a bit more narrow in scope, but there's 5 of them so there's usually one that goes into the direction I want at the moment.

Having a Plex library, Tidal also opens up options for on-the-fly "radio" stations built into Plex. It has things such as "artist radio" which will play similar artists, which is also an option depending on how much music discovery you're looking to have available.

(Sorry for the long-winded reply, but you've got good opinions elsewhere in this thread and were asking a question I've put entirely too much thought into over the years, so figured I'd aim for thorough).

Thank you for such a thorough write-up! This was SO helpful. Genuinely appreciated :)

Don't you want to read hundreds of comments with "Who's listening this in [insert year here]?" or how that song was the favourite of a dead relative? Lame.

No, seriously. Those are 90% of the comments I read in music videos on YouTube. Another 5% are the lyrics pasted continuously.