YouTube is celebrating ten years of its YouTube Music app with the launch of new features that bring it closer to rivals like Spotify. The app will now include “Taste Match” playlists. These combine multiple users’ overlapping musical interests into a single playlist that updates daily with tracks based on everyone’s tastes.
The service will also start notifying users of upcoming music releases, merchandise, and concerts. A new partnership with Bandsintown will help fans discover concerts directly when they are watching videos and Shorts on YouTube.
These additions help YouTube catch up with Spotify in some areas. Other new features, like badges and support for commenting, extend the social networking aspects of YouTube to the music service. Users can now leave comments on albums and playlists to create a more social listening experience. Fans can earn loyalty badges such as “First to Watch” or “Top Listener,” with more badges planned for the future. Artists can work toward music video watch milestones like 100,000 views, one million, or even one billion views.
The company also shared new statistics about the YouTube Music catalog, which now has over 300 million tracks. This includes studio recordings, live performances, remixes, and covers. For comparison, Spotify promotes a catalog of over 100 million tracks. YouTube also states its music service offers over four billion music-focused user-generated playlists, with 1.8 billion of those being public.
YouTube Music continues to grow. It went from 100 million users in February 2024 to over 125 million across YouTube Music and YouTube Premium combined as of March 2025, including free trials.