Google’sYouTube Musicis constantly adding new features to its toolkit in a bid to take on giants likeSpotify. One of the biggest additions to the platform in recent times is podcasts, with the head of YouTube’s podcasts division, Kai Chuk, confirming the arrival of podcasts on the streaming service back inlate February. While podcasts started appearing for some users in the subsequent months, the YouTube Music team is only now announcing a wider rollout of podcasts on the app for customers in the US.
Writing in asupport page post, a YouTube community manager said that podcasts from YouTube are now making their way to YouTube Music in the US, albeit in a gradual manner. If you currently listen to podcasts on the standard YouTube app, you can now switch over to the YouTube Music app.
YouTube Music users can enjoy podcasts in the background or offline without requiring a Premium subscription. This is different from the music-listening experience on YouTube Music, which doesn’t support offline or background playback unless you’repaying for Premium.
Listeners can pull up podcasts on-demand, cast them to nearby devices, or seamlessly switch back between audio and video versions of the podcasts on the platform without paying a cent. As for non-US residents, YouTube says the podcasts experience will venture into “other regions in the future” without specifying a date.
YouTube already has an extensive catalog of podcasts on its platform, so it was only a matter of time before they would come to Google’s premier music streaming platform. A big disadvantage compared to Spotify and even Google’s own Podcasts app is that only podcasts uploaded to YouTube will appear in YouTube Music, which severely limits the amount of available content. To appear on YouTube Music, podcasters have tobecome YouTuber Creators, with Google encouraging those who offer audio-only podcasts to upload their content as a video with a static image.
Although companies like Spotify have offered podcasts for a while now, the fact that millions of customers are already using YouTube will make this a relatively easy transition. By making features like offline playback free, there’s a lot of incentive to jump on board the YouTube Music podcasts train, especially those who have been held back by therising costsof the Premium subscription.
