Have you noticed how YouTube always prompts you to switch to its “YouTube Music” application whenever you’re watching music-related content? It can be very annoying, but with the new “listening controls” feature (in testing), you can prevent that disturbance with the dedicated music control settings in the main app. YouTube is now testing a dedicated “Listening controls” experience for music in the app.
9to5Google shared this new experience in a news report with images for confirmation. The report states that when you’re playing a music video, YouTube will overlay a “Show listening controls” chip on the video window.
By tapping the slides up a sheet it first shows the song/video name and channel in large text. Then Play/pause controls are flanked by next/last and 10-second rewind/forward actions. One interesting behaviour sees the last button go back to the previous video rather than the start of your current song. Meanwhile, the bottom row lets you like, save, and adjust playback speed (increments ranging from .25 to 2x).
These “Listening controls” are labelled as a “Premium” feature at the top of the sheet underneath the regular video window, which plays like normal and still shows the scrubber. This new feature also works when Casting content to a speaker.
The YouTube Premium subscriber that has this feature today only encountered it on iOS, and could not get Listening controls to appear on Android. We’ve been unable to replicate it on our devices, suggesting this is a limited rollout or A/B test.
The ramifications of YouTube getting Listening controls are interesting for YouTube Music. So far, Google has encouraged people to open the dedicated app, which is included with Premium subscriptions.
This just-introduced UI suggests that some people are just so familiar with listening to audio in the main client that YouTube has finally relented and created an optimized in-app experience. Additionally, Google is making it a paid perk to incentive upgrades (and remove ads).
