YouTube is adding new AI-powered features to YouTube Music. It’s designed to make it easier for listeners to discover music, explore artists, and find podcasts they might have missed.
Announced at this year’s Made On YouTube event, the updates include Ask Music, a music and podcast conversation tool, and Your Podcast Lineup, a personalized audio guide designed to help listeners discover new shows.
Built directly into the YouTube Music app, Ask Music lets users describe what they want to hear in everyday language, rather than searching for individual songs or artists. This feature works across YouTube Music’s entire catalog of over 300 million songs, including official recordings, remixes, live performances, covers, DJ sets, and more. Users can use it to build custom listening queues, explore artists’ motivations, and dig deep into music history.
YouTube explains that instead of searching manually, users simply type in their requests as if they were asking a friend. For example, someone can ask Ask Music to create a mix based on the tracks that inspired a particular song. Users can also ask other questions, such as who played bass on a particular song and other details about the song’s creation.
YouTube Music is also introducing Your Podcast Lineup, a personalized, AI-generated audio guide to discovering podcasts.
This feature is designed to address the common problem of having more podcasts than most people have time to listen to. Even listeners who already have a list of their favorite shows can have trouble keeping up with new episodes, let alone finding them.
The podcast lineup can be found on the Podcasts page in the YouTube Music app. Each week, we provide short audio previews of our featured shows and explain why they’re of interest to our listeners. You can then go directly to the suggested episode.
Spotify recently introduced AI-powered features along similar lines. Its Personal Podcasts feature uses AI to generate podcast episodes based on your interests and prompts.
These new features are part of YouTube’s broader push to use AI across its services. Last year, YouTube Music experimented with an AI-powered music host that delivered stories, fan trivia, and commentary related to what users were listening to.
Both updates will be available soon to YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscribers around the world.
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