announced a major upgrade to its streaming music service to take advantage of the company’s strengths in machine learning.
The most noticeable change at first glance to ay Music is a visual refresh, but the bigger deal is improved recommendations, a helping h when it comes to saving music offline. The interface is much less orange, instead launching with a soft white background that changes based on the different sections available to browse.
If you like a clean interface don’t mind some extra white space, you’ll take a liking to the new ay Music interface.
In the web app, where the new features are already live, you’ll see more sections that have suggested playlists based on additional factors. says it’ll tap into your location, so you might see something like “relaxing at home” or “powering through work” if you’ve told where you live where you earn your paycheck. There are also more playlists built from the ay Music team suggestions based on albums or artists you’ve spent a lot of time listening to.
ay Music wants to strike the right mood based on your listening history, location, the curated lists from the music experts.
On mobile, one of the most cumbersome aspects of ay Music has been managing music you want cached for offline use. I’m usually frantically downloading songs while the flight attendants are giving the safety instructions before being told to shut off the phones for takeoff.
says not with ay Music, “you’ll always be prepped with an offline playlist based on what you’ve listened to recently.”
’ll have to play around with this to see how it turns out in practice. But the promise is that you can fire up your ay Music app get music you prefer without the need to do any of the work on your own.
The changes are already live in the web app, while they’re rolling out to the mobile versions in ay the App Store.
The story behind the story: has never released subscriber numbers for ay Music, a recent report indicated YouTube Red (which includes a ay Music subscription) only had 1.5 million paying members. That’s considerably low compared to Spotify Apple Music, which are estimated at about 15 30 million respectively. By tapping into ’s strengths with machine learning the deep link into other services, the company is taking another shot at making up ground.
