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YouTube Music is celebrating its ten-year anniversary, and to mark the occasion, YouTube has announced various additions to its music listening app, which are designed to drive more engagement among fans.
First off, YouTube’s launched some new badges for fans, including “First to Watch,” “Top Listener,” and more, as a means to encourage, and even gamify, artist engagement.
As you can see in these examples, fans will be able to earn badges based on their engagement history, in order to show just how big a fan they are of an artist.
Which will no doubt prove popular, and will get more users engaging with their favorite bands and musicians more often in the app.
On a related front, YouTube’s also adding achievements for artists, so that fans can help them reach new engagement milestones.
As explained by YouTube:
“Music video watch milestones will highlight official artist videos nearing major ‘view’ milestones (think 100,000, 1M, even 1B views!) and motivate true fans to help their favorite artists hit major milestones.”
It’s another way to showcase your support, and incentivize more engagement with artists.
YouTube has also announced a new partnership with live music promotion platform Bandsintown, which will enable YouTube to highlight live shows in your region.
“We’re also adding new notifications to let you know when upcoming releases from your favorite artists are announced, new merch is dropping, or event dates are added – so fans never miss a beat.”
So now you’ll be able to keep updated on local shows by your favorite artists, which will help YouTube become a bigger hub for music engagement.
Which is a key focus. Both YouTube and Instagram have been adding more music features as a means to supplant TikTok as the main music engagement tool of choice, in the event that TikTok ends up getting banned in the U.S.
I mean, music engagement has always been huge on YouTube anyway, but with TikTok becoming the main platform for music sharing, YouTube is also looking to better position itself to take that mantle if opportunity arises.
YouTube’s also adding comments on albums and playlists, as another means to connect around music tastes, while it’s also rolling out “taste match playlists,” which will provide another means to find music that aligns with your interests.
YouTube says that its taste-matched playlists will be automatically updated daily, based on the music tastes of everyone that’s accessing them, which will also enable YouTube to keep users updated of relevant new releases.
And it’s got a lot of data to go on for this. YouTube says that YouTube Music users have created over 4 billion music playlists, including 1.8 billion public ones, so it has a huge amount of cross-matching it can do to find related interests.
These are some interesting options, that will likely drive more engagement in YouTube’s Music app, while the capacity to cross-promote live shows will be a welcome update for artists seeking to maximize the benefits of the tool.
Also, if you’re promoting any musicians, might be good to take a look at Bandsintown for expanded promotion.
