Vegar Henriksen
Original Poster
Passion for helping others
Sep 10, 2020

Megathread: Missing features & things that needs to improve

Hello YouTube Music family,
 
My name is Vegar and I'm a platinum product expert for YouTube Music. I have been seeing a lot of posts regarding missing features and things that needs to improve and I thought a consolidated and constantly updated list/overview here on the forum would be perfect!
 
If you feel like anything is missing or not working properly; this is the place to share and discuss! This list will be shared directly with the people working on the product, but is in no way a guarantee that these features will be added.
 
I also advise everyone to share feedback in the app or web player. You can do this using both the app and web player by tapping your profile icon and then "feedback".
 
This list is compiled by reading news articles, reviews, comment sections, this forum, Reddit and other social channels.
 
Missing features & things that needs to improve:
 
UI/UX
  1. Quick scroll - Faster scrolling with a quick scroll bar like GPM
  2. Loading - Preload entire view instead of chunks causing buffering
  3. Zoom to fill for mobile - Utilize the entire screen for music videos
  4. Select multiple items - Makes playlist/library management easier
  5. Light mode - Let there be light
  6. Landscape mode - Listen to music in landscape mode
  7. Bigger album art in search, grid view - Easier to see the albums
  8. My library - Option to make it the default screen
  9. Thumbs up/down - Reverse them so it is the right way
  10. Cast button - Should be available more places in the UI
  11. Uploads hidden - Hard to get to your uploads
Offline
  1. Improve caching - Avoid music from stopping when connection is lost momentarily
  2. Offline listening web - Add downloads to the PWA 
  3. Dedicated offline mode - Toggle to go offline, only display and play downloads
  4. Checks for incomplete downloads - Unnecessary notification
Features
  1. Sleep Timer - Automatically stops playback after the set timer ends.
  2. Crossfade - Makes songs flow better together with a smooth transition
  3. Playing near you - See concerts in your area
  4. Feeling lucky - Random music that helps discover new music
  5. Song popularity - See how many streams/plays a song has
  6. Monthly listeners - How many listens to an artist each month
  7. Block an artist - If you don't want to listen to them ever
  8. Smart control, connect - Control your music from other devices
  9. Play count - See how many times you have listened to a song
  10. FLAC, lossless - Better audio quality
  11. Official mode - Only play official music
  12. Volume normalization - Unified volume across all songs
Social
  1. Playlist followers - See how many people are following your playlist
  2. Artist playlists - Playlists created and shared by an artist
Playlist & library
  1. Custom album art - Upload your own album art
  2. Save queue as playlist - Easy to save your current listening session
  3. Library sorting - A-Z, Z-A, genre, artist, album, and so on
  4. Songs removed - Suddenly gone without replacement, have to be added again
  5. Playlist sync - Auto downloads and deletes songs
  6. Remove songs from official playlists - Delete unwanted songs
  7. Library tabs - Better organization that reduces clutter and makes more sense
Playback
  1. Playlist playback - Randomly pauses and stops playback
  2. Smart playback - Automatically switch to downloaded songs with bad connection
  3. Playlist playback limit - Will eventually just stop playing or skip songs
Integrations
  1. Last.fm integration - Keep track of the music you listen to
  2. Cast to sonos - Casting music directly to Sonos
  3. Discord integration - Let other people see what you are listening to
  4. Stadia integration - Control your music in-game
  5. Playstation/Xbox - App for game consoles
  6. Galaxy Watch/Garmin - App for smart watches
  7. Roku/Amazon Fire - App for smart TVs
  8. Better Google Assistant integration - Better voice commands and recognition
  9. API - Ability to create advanced integrations and functions
Uploaded music
  1. Download - Ability to download your uploaded music just like GPM
  2. Editing metadata - Ability to edit song/album metadata
  3. Automatically upload songs - Music manager
Casting
  1. Cast notification - Stop casting from notification
  2. Fireplace visualisation - Backdrop for casting to Chromecast
  3. Cast on web - Add cast functionality to the web player
  4. Shuffle/repeat for Chromecast - Buttons to shuffle and repeat
Auto/Bluetooth
  1. Better Android Auto integration - See playlists, low volume, cache
  2. Bluetooth connectivity - AVRCP 1.4 or higher
  3. Bluetooth - Display all song data
Misc
  1. Improve shuffle - Only works sometimes and may only shuffle a few songs
  2. Mini player - Pop-out mini player
  3. Still watching? - Annoying prompt
  4. Multiple devices at the same time - Have more than one device active at a time
  5. Device limit - Increase the device limit or make it easier to remove devices
  6. Improved media keys - Hit or miss if it works
  7. Child mode - Access to children under 13
  8. Genres - Search, block, star, prioritize
  9. Playlist time - Inconsistent number
  10. Manage downloads - Setting to see all your downloads and if they are up-to-date
  11. Clear queue - Remove everything from the current queue
  12. Disable autoplay - Turn off auto-adding songs to queue
  13. Don't play music videos - Should remove COPPA restrictions
  14. Radio - Improve algorithm to be more versatile
  15. Report problem - Option to report issues on each song/album
 
Yours sincerely,
Vegar Henriksen
Details
Ideas and Feedback,Web,YouTube Music Premium
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Last edited Dec 11, 2020
All Replies (280)
Steve MacKenzie
Sep 10, 2020
Some items to add to the list
- Playback of playlists stops intermittently
- Total play time of playlists is random i.e. seems to be capped at 7/8 hours but if I delete songs from the playlist then the playback time sometimes goes up, which makes no sense at all.  Why not just show the exact time rather than capping?
- Playback of long playlists seems to get confused (by skipping songs) if you delete songs from playlist on a different device without refreshing on playback device
- Can't view library alphabetically by artist
Sad Robot
Jun 28, 2021
I just realized something else I lost with GPM. I've been missing releases from some of my favorite artists (Modest Mouse and Saint Motel, to name two examples this week), and I realized I used to use GPM's "New Releases" radio station - a lot. Since GPM had my music tastes going back almost ten years, I always got great recommendations. That is now completely lost in YTM, not the least of which because that listening history is gone, but also because YTM's recommendation engine is a joke. RIP (again) GPM.
Nicolai Bøttcher Videsen
Jun 30, 2021
In general, so much of the good functionality from Google Play Music wasn't ported to YouTube Music and I can't wrap my head around why that is?!!!

It is embarrassing that Google are completely silent about the criticism that the users submit.

The only reason I am still using it, is that I can upload my own content and even that is not working very well
Tim V. S.
Jun 30, 2021
Hi, great list of features that are a must! My primary complaint is the lack of the landcape mode. There are so many car stereos out there with horizontal screen orientation and trying to play music on it looks like an app that got stock in "windows 98 mode". Thw same limitation on media boxes. I'm surprised that Google didn't even think about having lanscape mode available! Kinda embarrassing...
Engineering team, i understand it is quite some work to revamp layout to handle  different screens, but there are layout wigets that will allow extensive customizations. At minimum, i would ask just to split screen to have one side display album art the other - play controls.
Thank you for your consideration.
Cheers, and happy coding!
Rickard E
Jul 20, 2021
I have not read all the 271 replies so i guess this have been requested a lot of times before.

Please make a way to disconnect Youtube Music from Youtube. I use Youtube for videos and i use Youtube Music for music. I don't want recommendations on Youtube based on that i have been listing to on Youtube Music. And i don't want Youtube videos on Youtube Music that isn't music that happens now and then.

Since i started using Youtube Music 4-5 years ago it feels like nothing change, nothing important have been added. Still we don't have the ability to cast to chromecast in my browser!
Brent T
Jul 30, 2021
Apple CarPlay. Make it possible to fast forward and rewind a song please.
At the moment I find it annnoying that it's impossible to do this since sometimes I want to listen to a certain part in a song and it is not possible to fast forward without taking my phone.
While driving I'd rather not take my phone.
Paul Sanders 2648
Aug 24, 2021
100% agree with a lot in here.
I've waited patiently for youtube music to get some of the basic stuff and now I'm fed up of youtube thinking me saying "shuffle all" means "shuffle a couple of songs and then give up".
I'm going to check out spotify or some other streaming service that actually cares.

--
Paul
Hal Wilke
Aug 24, 2021
New Releases should be sortable/filterable by genre.

I would like to see the New Releases section viewable by Genre.  Every Friday when New Releases hit I check them out.  My New Release section is full of popular music that I never play.  It would be great if I could just sort it to the genre I feel like listening to, and get a big scroll of just that genre.  It doesn't matter how much jazz I listen to, the New Release section might have one or two a week.  Also, my listening habits are diverse enough, and my kids add songs when I am listening that they like, that I will throw off any algorithm that tries to figure out what I like.
Sad Robot
Sep 1, 2021
It says a lot that this post is the most popular by far on this forum but it's not featured. I guess I should be happy they haven't locked it like they do all the other threads critical of the lack of basic functionality within YTM.
Adam S 538
Sep 18, 2021
From skimming the discussion topics you'd think there aren't a whole bunch of bugs with basic functionality in YTM that they haven't gotten around to fixing after well over a year.

It is almost like the mod modus operandi of locking topics about those ongoing bugs is an effort to stifle discussion and stop us from drawing public attention to those bugs. If there is a more valid reason I'd love to hear it.
User 8029
Sep 20, 2021
A year has gone by, and we still can't update album art or edit meta-data so that we can sort our albums correctly!
Sad Robot
Oct 11, 2021
Adam, you're 100% right. This thread has by far the most comments of any thread I've ever seen here, and still has never been featured.
Sad Robot
Oct 11, 2021
Also, this week I lost at least 1 playlist from YTM. Gone. Why? I'm scared to death my main playlist with over 4000 songs that I've been working on for a decade will just disappear one day. Is there a way to back that up?
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