Photo Credit: Ivan Radic
About one week after it began testing a Shorts-like music video offering called Samples, YouTube Music has reportedly started integrating play counts.
This latest feature from the streaming service, which has also bolstered its radio experience and added real-time lyrics on the year, just recently came to light in a Reddit post. According to the observant Redditor who disclosed the play-count addition, select YouTube Music users can now see how many streams artists’ top songs have racked up.
While concrete details about the feature are few and far between – YouTube Music doesn’t appear to have formally announced the play-count buildout, which has yet to reach certain accounts – the original poster noted that the involved figures seem to reflect plays from tracks’ various official uploads.
These plays could include YouTube views on verified music videos and audio-only uploads as well as streams on YouTube Music itself, the eagle-eyed fan indicated. For reference, the Google-owned platform previously confirmed that music-video views on Music are in fact accounted for in views on YouTube proper.
Given the latter’s popularity and Google’s overarching effort to add Premium and Music subscribers despite competition from well-entrenched streaming players, logic suggests that it makes sense to pool official uploads’ plays and views on YouTube Music.
Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” shows 348 million plays on YouTube Music in a screenshot included with the Reddit post, for instance. The track’s music video has about 134 million views at present, whereas the audio-only upload has generated approximately 756 million streams on Spotify.
Longer term, it’ll be worth keeping an eye on the other streaming expansions and improvements of YouTube Music, which in late April rolled out podcasts for paid users and non-subscribers alike.
Furthermore, different streaming platforms are also building out, optimizing, and diversifying in an attempt to catch up to Spotify, which has forecasted 530 million MAUs (including 217 million paid users) for Q2. Paris-headquartered Deezer, which is hunting for particularly substantial subscriber and revenue growth, yesterday debuted a standalone app called Zen by Deezer.
Currently downloadable solely in France, Zen represents one component of Deezer’s “ambition to become the number one destination for wellbeing in a growing market,” per the Access Industries-owned company. (Notably, notwithstanding the gargantuan song library on Deezer and competing streaming services, Zen costs €11.99 per month – one euro more than Deezer.)
Separately, Block’s Tidal two days back launched a hub called “Artist Home,” and Apple Music brought its Classical app to Android devices on Tuesday.