YouTube Musicwas met with a lot of criticism when it was first positioned as a Google Play Music replacement, but the company managed to make the newmusic playerbetter with every update. The latest tweak to YouTube Music on the web offers a throwback to Play Music by adding a new sidebar for navigation and quick access to all your playlists.
The redesign reorganizes the navigation in the web app, moving the Home, Explore, and Library sections to a new sidebar. In the place of the previous top-tab navigation, a big search bar is now available, prompting you to “Search songs, albums, artists, podcasts.”
With a new hamburger menu icon (three horizontal lines) next to the YouTube Music logo in the top left lets you expand the sidebar. This reveals an extended section below the three top-level navigation options, offering quick access to all the playlists in your library. There is also a button at the top of the section that lets you create a new playlist right from anywhere in the app.
The sidebar stays visible even when you open the Now Playing section. Depending on your taste, this makes the app either more useful and easier to navigate or adds unwanted clutter.
At narrower window sizes, the sidebar disappears completely. To access it, you have to click the hamburger menu. Compared to the previous design, which arranged the navigation buttons at the top, this is a small step back.
At the same time, the YouTube Music redesign is a throwback to the Google Play Music website of old. While Play Music’s design feels decidedly more dated when looking back at it today, it also offered a big search bar at the top, with the rest of the navigation options and your playlists arranged in a sidebar.
The new YouTube Music design makes a lot of sense on laptop and desktop screens with their standard widescreen configuration. The new look manages to give you access to more navigation options and all your playlists without really sacrificing much space for content.
At the same time, YouTube Music still only offers a stretched out phone interface on landscape-oriented tablets. With the desktop redesign widely rolling out already, we can only hope that a similar sidebar-based design for tablets and foldables is coming soon, something Google has already implemented for a lot of its other apps.
YouTube Music for the web is available onmusic.youtube.com. There is a free ad-supported tier, but for the full feature set, you have to pay $10 a month or use it as part of the $12 YouTube Premium subscription.
