It may not be the absolutebest music streaming servicein everyone’s eyes, but you’re able to’t argue thatYouTube Musichas come a long way since its inception. Google has been hard at work trying to keep up with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, adding useful new features likereal-time lyricsandfull song creditsin recent months. Now, one hotly requested feature is finally making its way to YouTube Music: play counts.
These new play counts don’t just tell you how many timesyou’velistened to a song — they show the total number of plays a song has received from all users across the YouTube Music platform. Much likeSpotify’s implementation, you only see play counts when you open an artist’s landing page — and even then, only the tracks listed underTop songswill show this info. TappingMorehere to view the rest of the artist’s most popular songs doesn’t show play counts, sadly, so it’s just the top five songs that get this treatment.
Some Redditorshave spotted the new play counts in both the Android app and the web player, and we’re also seeing it in version6.03.51of the YouTube Music app in the US. But knowing Google’s approach to these types of features, it’s likely a server-side change being tested on a certain percentage of accounts before making a wide rollout to all users in the coming weeks.
Interestingly, the play counts reveal that theTop songssection in an artist’s landing page doesn’t always show the artist’s top songs in order. For instance, the first track listed in Outkast’s top songs isMs. Jacksonat 592 million plays, but their most played song,Hey Ya!, is listed second despite having 708 million plays.
On one hand, this is just another drop in the bucket of bringing YouTube Music up to feature parity with Spotify, but on the other, it’s a highly-requested piece of functionality that helps new listeners discover an artist’s most popular songs. At the very least, people won’t have to force play counts to appear with aChrome extensionanymore.
