YouTube’s new Samples feed makes music short-form

YouTube is making music short-form.

Starting today, it’s rolling out the Samples tab, which YouTube director of product management Brandon Bilinski tells Tubefilter is “a focused music discovery experience.”

Here’s what it looks like in action: The Samples tab is a personalized, music-only recommendation feed that presents 30-second cuts from music videos and live performances of songs. It’s meant to capitalize on the fact that YouTube’s noticed the No. 2 way people discover new songs is through short-form content. (No. 1 is through friends and family.) It’s also meant to be a kind of “appetizer to the full meal” that is the song or performance’s long-form video, Bilinski says.

Samples are taken from music videos/performances in the official YouTube Music library. From each sample video, viewers can choose to watch the full video, add the song to their own YouTube Music collection, start a new playlist with it, use it to create a Short, see the album page, or share it to friends.

YouTube says the new feed serves a dual purpose: it helps viewers find new songs and artists, and it helps artists find new listeners.

Bilinski says artists who don’t want their songs displayed in the Sample feed can opt out, but “we’ve talked to a lot of artists and labels and explained how it’s great to be in the candidate set for discovery.”

YouTube Music viewers around the world will start seeing the Samples tab today. YouTube says it plans to use data from Samples to “explore how this type of short-form discovery can inform other parts of the YouTube Music app.”