YouTube’s testing a new way to ensure that you don’t miss any uploads from your favorite creators in the app, while it’s also looking to help users find more relevant music matches, even via humming a tune to locate a track.
First off, YouTube’s testing a new channel shelf in the Subscriptions feed where you’ll be able to see when a channel that you subscribe to has uploaded multiple new clips.
As per YouTube
“We’re starting to test bundling multiple uploads from a single creator within a short amount of time into a shelf in the Subscriptions feed. We’re experimenting with this for a few reasons – as a way to make it easier for viewers to find the content they’re looking for, to put less pressure on creators to upload multiple times a day, and to make it simpler for viewers to engage with the content in the shelf and/or navigate to other content while scrolling in their feed.”
So rather than seeing various new videos from a single creator in the main feed, you’ll be able to check out all of their latest videos since you last logged in within a separate stream.
That could make it easier to stay on top of the latest content from your favorite creators, and ensure that you don’t miss anything, while also, potentially, making the main subscriptions feed less chaotic.
The only challenge will be in ensuring that users are aware of the update, and that they’re using these new filters to watch the latest content, but no doubt YouTube will have accounted for this in the UI.
YouTube says that it’s currently testing this with a small percentage of viewers.
YouTube’s other new test is a new song discovery process, which will enable users to hum a tune into the app, in order to find the track they have in mind.
As per YouTube:
“We’re experimenting with the ability for folks to search for a song on YouTube by humming or recording a song that’s currently being played. If you’re in the experiment, you can toggle from YouTube voice search to the new song search feature, and hum or record the song you’re searching for for 3+ seconds in order for the song to be identified.”
So it’s like Shazam, but for YouTube specifically, and with seemingly some level of advanced recognition of humming, which can obviously only reference the melody, and can’t use YouTube’s existing audio ID elements.
If the system can identify the track that you’re looking for, you’ll then be shown a listing of related YouTube content, including official music videos, user-generated clips, and/or Shorts that feature the searched song.
So now, if you have that one tune that’s replaying over and over in your head, and you can’t think of what it is, maybe try humming it into the YouTube app to see what it can find.
YouTube says that the experiment is rolling out to “a small percentage of people across the globe who watch YouTube on Android devices”.