With the recent launch of YouTube Music, we now have four different YouTube apps. YouTube’s become so big — full of slay queens videos, music, let’s-plays, vlogs, comedy and much more — that it’s hard to find the specific videos you want.
Each app has its own tricks and tools for the optimal experience. Let’s break down the differences and why you’d want to use each.
You likely know all about YouTube, the online hosting site with millions of videos of all stripes. The YouTube app lets you watch these videos away from a computer on your phone, tablet or TV.
The app focuses almost entirely on subscriptions and suggestions. The more you watch, the more recommendations you’ll get for relevant or related videos YouTube thinks you’ll like. If you’re subscribed to a channel, updates and new uploads appear in a dedicated tab, where you can easily keep up with your favorite YouTube creators and personalities.
The search tool helps you find any of the millions of videos uploaded to the service and you can narrow your results by upload date, video quality, length and more, but not by type of content. That means you’ll get a lot of different kinds of results for every search.
YouTube offers millions of free videos, plus you can purchase or rent movies and TV show episodes through the app as well. Those will cost extra and the price varies by title.
YOUTUBE MUSIC
Launched in November, Music is the newest app from YouTube. It’s dedicated entirely to music, with video playlists of songs, suggested tunes and a dedicated music search tool. All of the videos in the app are of music or somehow music-related, so you won’t have dig through irrelevant videos to find what you want. Even better, when you search for videos you won’t see nonmusical content, and labels clearly highlight official music videos, fan videos and audio-only results.
The app is divided into three tabs for recommended videos, “YouTube Music today” and videos you’ve liked. “YouTube Music today” is a really neat space that shows themed playlists of popular music, internationally trending songs and albums, eye-grabbing videos and more.
YouTube Music also includes radio stations of music based on a particular artist or song, similar to Pandora. You can control how much variety you’ll hear for any given station with a slider that controls the tunes. The app pays attention to your musical tastes to make suggestions and fine-tune your stations automatically.
Credit: Jonilar,Cnet,KwabenaYi
