Ask us anything! YouTube Music Product Team will be here Friday September 21st to answer.

Along with building new, innovative features that weren’t on Google Play Music, we are working hard to make sure we support the most important GPM features in YouTube Music (including personal uploads) before migrating users over. There is a lot of work to do, so we don’t have a specific timeline at this point.

We want to make it really easy for you to bring over your library (including playlists), uploads, and history from GPM to YTM, but we don’t have a timeline as mentioned above. Our goal is to phase the migration, so we'll start by allowing you to migrate non-uploaded content, and then eventually support full migration including uploads.

Our plan is to have it be as simple as tapping a single button to migrate all of their GPM content over to YouTube music. A lot of the work we will be doing to make this seamless is around ensuring that we resolve duplicates and give users the library they expect even if they've used both apps (like I have).

I talked a little about this above, but this is something we are very focused on. Some data will be purely additive, like bringing over your playlists. Some data will be merged, like our understanding of which artists you love and your thumbs ups. To get to the heart of your question, our plan here is seamless merging, not overwriting.

We want to make sure to strike a good balance between amazing sounding audio and also not burning through your data. Here are some specifics about audio quality in YouTube Music:

Right now if you stream at Normal quality, you are getting 128kbps AAC as your bitrate. For premium subscribers, we offer High quality which is 256kbps AAC. If you have flaky network connectivity or want to save data, you can switch to low quality which is 48kbps HE-AAC. 256kbps AAC is equivalent in audio quality to the 320kbps CBR mp3 that we had for GPM, but it uses less data.

As mentioned in my intro post, Audio Quality selection is now live for both iOS and Android for YouTube Music Premium members.

Right now we don’t have any plans for audio quality higher than 256kbps. Our deals would require us to charge more to stream FLAC, so at this point we are focused on improving performance rather than supporting lossless streaming.

We noticed some questions regarding playlists, and I've responded to the top questions here:

The library team is working on a number of playlist improvements, including better sorting within the songs of a playlist. We don’t currently have a plan for filtering, but it’s a feature request we have heard from you.]

We did separate albums & playlists from YouTube Music so they don’t show up in YouTube.com. We are now looking at allowing the users to do this for subscriptions as well.

The ability to browse the amazing, deep YouTube catalog is a definite priority for us. For now, you should be able to search for genres, decades, and moods and find great playlists for all those occasions.

You can add playlists to your library, share playlists with others (even non-subscribers), and search for user-created playlists. For example, here’s a fantastic playlist from NPR Music of the 200 greatest songs from 21st century women: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy2PCKGkKRVZ-6OfKINL6_bkus7MDZJMn

It’s something the team is actively working on, but we don’t have a date on that for you at this time.

Mentioned above, but we do know that Dark Side of the Moon just isn’t the same without true gapless and are working on it :)

One exciting update for today is that we have fully launched audio quality (and download quality) selection on both iOS and Android for YouTube Music Premium users. See here for more information: https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9076559

I saw some questions about the difference between features on iOS and Android. In general, our strategy is to develop and release features across both clients simultaneously. There are some cases where a feature is client-specific like support for the equalizer on Android, which is coming very soon, but that shouldn't be the norm going forward.

In the particular case of Audio Quality, we found a bug during launch of both iOS and Android that only affected the Android build, so it took us a little bit longer to roll that feature out on Android (though it’s live today for subscribers). In general, our goal is to launch things across iOS and Android simultaneously, and you will see this with our upcoming launches happening throughout the rest of the year and beyond.

Mentioned in my intro post, but we are fully live now with Audio Quality on Android as well.

We actually do testing and experiment ramp-ups on both clients, but as mentioned above audio quality launched first on iOS due to a bug we found in the Android implementation.

Artists and their labels are able to designate a certain song or album to be premium-only, in which case it is only allowed for premium members; this is not a decision made by the YouTube Music team.

There are folks on the team actively working on making cast and assistant more stable and faster. We are always always working on improving the results in assistant queries.

I saw a lot of questions about general feature differences between GPM and YTM. I was the PM for most of GPM's existence, and I'm definitely aware of what work we still need to do here. That said there are a lot of really incredible things that YouTube Music already does better than GPM (sharing, Playlist creation, ability to have videos and songs side-by-side to name a few).

Yes - this is very much still in progress. And hopefully you’ve seen those gaps shrink in the weeks since YouTube Music relaunched. Our teams are hard at work bringing remaining artists on board for the countries we’ve already launched in, and the countries we’re launching in soon.

Individual user play count will be coming to YTM before the GPM migration. I do like the idea of some sort of UI that shows when you've listened to an album as long as it doesn't feel too much like unread emails :)

Single song and video playback automatically starts radio based on that play. You can also double-tap on any of our playlists to play them back in a smart-shuffled order that is similar to GPM’s curated stations.

We do cache the next song in YouTube Music and are working on a long-held cache in YouTube Music that’ll behave like GPM’s does today. 

New albums do appear on the artist page at 12am ET on Fridays, and if they’re from an artist that you like they’ll show up on the New Releases shelf on your Home page. Sometimes there is a delay in search, but last night at 9:01pm my time, I was able to see the new Mountain Man record in search right away: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_ngLm9fjsXHKBx8VUSX4ol0lIdHq4lpW9Q

A few of you mentioned that your recommendations haven't been as relevant as they could be. We are constantly learning from your plays and thumbs to make sure that our homepage delivers a truly personal listening experience. When you first use the app, we have a way for you to tell us artists you like, and will soon allow users to retake that quiz to adjust their recommendations.

The Home page is full of recommendations beyond the family of “Hotlist” playlists, but search also provides a great path: search for any song you’re in the mood for, and you get that song followed by an unending station of related songs.

I’ll start anecdotally that I have a somewhat broad set of tastes with my big three genres being indie rock/electro, black/death metal, and hip-hop. My Home page is pretty spot on for recommendations. The New Release shelf this morning had some new hip-hop and indie, and my Listen Again shelf was my favorite playlists for working in the morning, including a curated Dream Pop playlist. The more you listen and thumbs up, the better we get at learning.

Being YouTube Music, we want to make sure that people get the best experience across both audio and video. For example, you can create and share playlists that have both songs and videos in them in order to get the most complete view of your favorite music. We are working hard on improving the interaction between the two, which will address a lot of the questions below:

The team is working on a really exciting overhaul of how we play audio and video in order to really show off YouTube’s amazing catalog of content. I can’t discuss much more about it, but it’s something we want to launch in the near future.

If you are a subscriber of YouTube Music Premium, playing back albums will only play the audio version of all the songs instead of mixing in music videos.

You can filter search results by song or album to hide the video searches, and we are working on better search ordering based on the content you primarily consume.

In general, we always try to prefer the original (explicit) version. Certainly if you added the original version, we should be respecting that.

Thanks for your feedback on Android Auto! This is something we are aware of and working towards.