Music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music currently dominate the segment, butYouTube Musicisn’t too far behind. The app has seen a handful of exciting additions in the recent past, asreal-time lyricsmade their way to the platform, while Google also rolled out visual changes to theapp’s Library tabearlier this month. The app has now secretly gained a new social feature, enabling users to make their listening stats public.
While users can already display public playlists on their profile, this feature addition takes things a step further. The ability to make listening stats public can be found underYouTube Music Settings -> Privacy & location -> Channel settings ->Enable public stats.Users will see a dialog box warning them of the repercussions of making things publicly visible. There’s also a note here that public stats will appear on the channel for up to two years and that any new stats or metrics added to YouTube Music will be turned off by default.
Enabling public stats gives you access to theAdvanced privacy settingsoption in theChannel settingsmenu. Users will find four toggles inside this menu —Show songs on repeat,Show artists on repeat,Show music videos on repeat, andShow playlists on repeat.These toggles also specify that music videos and playlists will only appear on the user’s profile if their visibility is set to public.
I’m seeing the changes in the YouTube Music app already, while our Google Editor Manuel Vonau can also vouch for its visibility. But as9to5Googlepoints out, Google hasn’t published thesupport pagefor this feature addition just yet, and there are no mentions of it from the YouTube team either.
Nevertheless, this exercise could be Google’s attempt to add a sprinkling of social skills to YouTube Music. It won’t be new to the business, however, with Spotify offering its own version of stats on users' profiles which issupposedly getting a redesign. Meanwhile,Apple Musicalso has a similar feature in place.
