YouTube Music TikTok-like feature, Samples, aims to help you discover new music

YouTube Music is trying out a new way to help users find tracks. It's called Samples and it occupies a new tab in the YouTube Music app. The company describes it as a seamless feed of short form video segments to get you to your new favourite music, offering a TikTok-like vertical scrolling mechanism.

The Samples feed is a personalized one, so when you open it, the app will attempt to provide a wide swath of preferred music. If you find something you like, you can tap to play the song, watch the full video, add it to a playlist, or even make a short with it as the soundtrack.

TikTok's Music Discovery Dominance

YouTube's advantage here is that it's the only place you can do all those things in a single app. YouTube's really going after all things audio, all in one place. YouTube Music and its competitors all live and die by their discovery mechanisms.

However, TikTok is the dominant player here. It is so central to music discovery for some people that Spotify's Top Hits and TikTok Songs playlists often look alarmingly similar. Now, TikTok is beginning to roll out its full-fledged music app, TikTok Music, to try and capture the whole listening experience.

YouTube is trying to do the same thing from the opposite direction. Samples seems designed to try and capture the same experience by giving you the best moment of every song ever recorded in the hopes that you might go check out the whole thing.

YouTube and TikTok aren't the only Players here

To recall, Spotify's recent redesign, has some of the same aims and design ideas as Samples. But that redesign was met with swift backlash, although the company has continued to look for ways to use TikTok mechanisms to help connect people to new tunes.

Samples should be much less controversial given that it's just a tab in the app, but it's yet another example of just how powerful that fast twitch vertical scroll has become in helping people discover new content.

YouTube's Advantage

"The seamless feed of short form video segments is powered by 'the world's largest catalog of music videos," YouTube proudly boasts. The Samples feed promises to explore the depths and breadth of the YouTube Music library so that there's always something new to listen to. Each immersive clip offers a glimpse into the artist, the video, and the feel of the song. You can swipe vertically to go to the next one, and the next one, and so on.

When you like what you hear, it's easy to quickly add the song in question to your collection, share it with friends, create your next playlist, kick off a radio station based upon it, watch the full video, visit the album page, and even use the song to create your own YouTube Short. The Samples tab is rolling out in the YouTube Music app globally starting today.

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