The YouTube Music experience hasn’t always been the smoothest, but some of its latest updates make it more enjoyable. It recently caught up to other streamers when it added real-time lyrics for certain songs, but now it looks like it could be adding a feature that the rest don’t have. You could soon be able to learn if a song is a cover without having to dive deep into the credits.
Earlier today, a Reddit user searched for the song “Jesus He Knows Me” by the Swedish band Ghost and noticed, in the search screen, that YouTube Music labeled it as a cover. However, when they went to the album page, that label disappeared. For those who aren’t familiar with the track, Genesis originally released it back in 1991, but Ghost put its own spin on it this year. The cover has over a million views on YouTube, perhaps prompting the streaming service to add the label.
In our testing, we couldn’t get YouTube Music to replicate the label with this specific song. However, we tested with a few others with mixed results. When searching for “Tainted Love,” we found that the radio station associated with the track showed Cover, but the song itself lacked the label. Milky Chance’s cover of the same song also didn’t get labeled, but its related radio station did.
We also tried searching for Whitney Houston’s take on “I Will Always Love You,” a cover of Dolly Parton’s song from 1973. In this instance, we couldn’t find a single mention of it being a cover. It’s possible that YouTube Music is currently in the process of incorporating these labels across the platform, or that it’s just a test. Given the high number of covers across the streamer, it might take a while for it to become widespread.
If you already listen to a lot of cover songs and want to indulge yourself in more projects containing re-imagined versions of other artists’ tracks, then YouTube Music’s newly launched recommended albums feature might be able to guide you in the right direction.
