The algorithm is still the real DJ
Radio on the streaming music app. It’s a silly little anachronism that we, as listeners, accept. Some entity we’re not personally acquainted with curates a few songs for us to listen to based off of as little as a whiff of an interest — a genre, an artist, an album, maybe even a specific song. Boom! It’s a magic radio station. YouTube Music, though, may soon give you a way to put in a few more ingredients to make some radio stew.
A new feature called “Create a radio” has been circulating out to some users — a home screen call-to-action card will be the big draw for them.
Just as they would during first-time setup, users pick from an array of artists to include in their station, then progress to a screen where they can choose whether their mix is made up of the known, the unknown, or both, plus a few other toggles for deep cuts, moods, and other spices. A playlist is then generated.
As u/notjhoan and a few other people who have this feature note on the r/YoutubeMusic subreddit, it seems users can’t add the playlist to their library. The inclusion of Mäneskin’s “Beggin'” in a radio station populated with K-Pop artists is also… a choice that has been made. Also, as our cross-town colleagues at 9to5Google point out, having the playlist name just be the list of the artists’ names is a little unwieldy to say the least — note to the devs at Google: stick in a title field in the crafting workflow, please. Thanks.
Of course, features in A/B testing may not end up being permanent additions. That said, Spotify has played around with this concept as the occasional lark, so perhaps YouTube Music wants to place some fightin’ stakes here.
