YouTube adds song play counts, AI playlist art creator in Music app

San Francisco, Dec 16

Google-owned YouTube has added play counts for every song in its Music app and broadened the availability of the generative AI creator for playlist art.

Users will now see the play count for every track when they browse an album or public playlist generated by YouTube Music.

It's right next to the artist name and song length in the Android and iOS apps, reports 9to5Google.

Previously, this information was provided in "Song details" at the bottom of the Now Playing Related tab. Moreover, another YouTube Music feature seeing a wider rollout this week is the AI-driven playlist artwork creator.

This feature provides a variety of themes for users to personalise their playlist covers.

When users see one of their playlists, a circular pencil icon appears in the bottom-right corner of the cover, allowing them to customise the theme.

This includes colours, travel, nature, animals, landscapes, food and drinks, or fantasy. Users can then customise one to three aspects of the chosen theme.

After selecting the desired theme, click "Create", a series of AI images will be generated.

YouTube Music will provide seven alternatives, with the option to access 'More' at the end. Users can then select it and click "save" to make it the playlist art, the report explained.

Meanwhile, YouTube has announced a new comment moderation setting, "Pause", allowing creators and moderators to prevent viewers from creating new comments while keeping existing comments on videos.

Users can find the Pause option in the video-level comment settings in the upper right-hand corner of the comments panel on either the watch page in the app or in YouTube Studio.