YouTube Introduces New Samples Tab in its Music App

TikTok’s unique vertical video feed has been copied by virtually every major platform in recent years. Following the trend, popular social media streaming app YouTube has announced today that they will be adding a vertical video stream to their app called Samples.

There is now a dedicated Samples section within the YouTube Music app. “a seamless feed of short-form video segments to get you to your new favourite music,” the business says, sums up what TikTok is all about. Samples is like the popular app TikTok, except that its content consists entirely of short clips from music videos. It’s possible, considering the state of the art in music discovery in the year 2023.

Even if YouTube Music hasn’t been as innovative or bold with music discovery as some other applications, Samples aims to alter that.

Spotify just released a huge update that, in essence, raises the bar for Samples. The app’s music, podcast, and audiobook streams all include personalized recommendation cards. Nonetheless, the new user interface has been quite divisive among Spotify customers, so it’s nice that YouTube Music is isolating the new experience to a separate tab, at least for the time being.

T. Jay Fowler, YouTube Music’s director of product management, says, “In the future, we’ll explore how this kind of short-form discovery can inform other parts of the YouTube Music app and look for opportunities to provide joyful new experiences that make it easy to discover new artists and their music.“

As of today, August 15th, the new Samples tab is available everywhere.