A genius move: YouTube Music adds ‘Samples’ tab for Instagram Reels-style discovery

YouTube Music is now rolling out a new feature called “Samples,” which will appear as a tab at the bottom of the app’s navigation once updated. This seems like it may be a server-side switch, so if you don’t see it right away, you’ll know why. The new tab is essentially Instagram Reels, TikTok or YouTube Shorts, but for YouTube Music. It gives you short, personalized music discovery for your short attention span.

To differentiate itself from the aforementioned services, it will focus on 30-second excerpts from high-quality music videos and other content that artists have directly uploaded. Team YouTube also seems to have intelligently cropped these vertically using its new AI tool we discussed last week.

If you’re anything like me and your body is made up of equal parts music as it is coffee, then this is pretty freaking exciting. I often listen to songs and artists I already know, and the only real discovery I dive into is whatever artists appear at the bottom of the page while I’m viewing an album. With this, I’m going to be placing my new and listen later queue on overdrive.

Once you discover something new that you like, you can quickly add the song to your collection, share it with friends, create your next favorite playlist, or even start a new radio station. If you’re interested in watching the full video or visiting the album page, you can do so with just a tap on the Sample’s options.

If you’re an artist, you had better take immediate advantage of this feature, because people using YouTube Music, myself included, are going to be all over this. I know a load of smaller indie artists that would stand to grow their audience considerably using short form audio content!

The Samples tab is coming to both Android and iOS devices as a global, ad-free experience for both free and Premium users. Whoever decided this should be a thing at Team YouTube needs a massive, freaking raise. I just can’t believe this is only now being invented for music in Google’s products, and I think it’s going to be fun to use!