Photo credit: Ivan Radic
About a week after YouTube Music began testing a Shorts-like music video offering called “Samples,” it has reportedly started incorporating play counts.
This latest feature from the streaming service, which has also improved its radio experience and added real-time lyrics as the year progresses, was recently brought to light in a Reddit post. According to the perceptive Redditor, who announced the play count increase, select YouTube Music users can now see how many streams artists’ top songs have garnered.
While there are few specific details about this feature – YouTube Music does not appear to have officially announced the expansion of play counts, which has not yet been achieved for certain accounts – the original poster noted that the numbers involved appear to be Replays of tracks ‘ various official uploads.
Those renditions could include YouTube views of verified music videos and audio-only uploads, as well as streams on YouTube Music itself, the eagle-eyed fan indicated. Google’s own platform serves as a reference confirmed that the views of music videos on “Music” are actually counted in the views on YouTube itself.
Given the popularity of the latter and Google’s overall efforts to attract premium and music subscribers despite competition from incumbent streaming providers, it makes sense that bundling plays and views of official uploads onto YouTube Music makes sense .
Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” shows 348 million plays on YouTube Music in an attached screenshot the reddit post, for example. The track’s music video currently has around 134 million views, while the audio-only upload has generated around 756 million streams on Spotify.
Longer-term, it’s worth keeping an eye on the other streaming additions and enhancements from YouTube Music, which launched podcasts for both paying users and non-subscribers in late April.
In addition, various streaming platforms are also being expanded, optimized and diversified to catch up with Spotify, which forecast 530 million MAUs (including 217 million paid users) for the second quarter. Paris-headquartered Deezer, which is poised for particularly strong subscriber and revenue growth, yesterday unveiled a standalone app called Zen by Deezer.
Currently downloadable only in France, Zen is part of Deezer’s “goal to become the #1 wellbeing destination in a growing market,” according to the company, which is owned by Access Industries. (It’s worth noting that despite the massive song library on Deezer and competing streaming services, Zen costs €11.99 a month — a euro more than Deezer.)
Separately, Block’s Tidal launched a hub called Artist Home two days ago, and Apple Music brought its Classical app to Android devices on Tuesday.