If YouTube Music isn’t missing a basic feature you’d expect it to have had at launch, then the feature is in extensive A/B testing and only available to a minority of subscribers. Just earlier today, one of the former changes was spotted: The ability to set a casted track to repeat. Unfortunately, though it was spotted in the wild, the feature doesn’t actually… what’s the term — work?
The change was spotted over on the YouTube Music subreddit, and I can confirm it’s live on my device — for certain definitions of “live.” The change allows you to actually select the repeat button and cycle through the options while casting, but it doesn’t actually seem to affect anything. The person that spotted the feature claims it entirely disconnects after playing through once. My own testing was slightly better: Selecting a single song to repeat was simply disregarded, and the next song would be played. If I tried to repeat a full playlist or album, though, it errored out and the cast would crash with the following error:
Error: Error.
The appearance of an interactive icon is almost certainly an indicator that the change is being worked on, but today’s news almost encapsulates the YouTube Music experience to date: If a feature isn’t outright missing, it’s missing for some people as part of a painfully slow rollout, or it’s simply broken.
Some day YouTube Music will be a fully-featured music subscription service and app — or, at least, it will meet the benchmark set by Google Play Music — but that day is not today.
Alternate evergreen title: YouTube Music almost has a basic feature you expected it would have launched with, but it’s not available for everyone yet and/or broken
