YouTube Music’s radio queues could soon get a significant improvement

YouTube Music looks as though it is testing another new feature that will let listeners customize their radio queues via a list of filters found under the ‘Up Next’ section of the playlist.

The feature doesn’t seem to be widely available to YouTube Music subscribers just yet, but it was brought to light over on the YouTube Music subreddit (opens in new tab). The post features an image displaying the filters appearing just above the playlist in the form of pill-shaped selections (thanks, 9To5Google (opens in new tab)).

Hanubeki, the Reddit user who made the original post, states the image shows filters options for “All” (which appears to be the default option), “Familiar,” “Recommendation” and “Instrumental.” They add that the options seem to change on a per-song basis, varying when a different song is played.

The aim of the feature seems to be allow listeners to customize their radio queues on the fly, without the need to back out and choose a different playlist entirely. If you’re glancing at your Up Next queue and not liking what you see, in theory, these filters may be able to adjust the list to include more songs that are to your liking.

Is YouTube Music on a roll?

YouTube Music has impressed us in recent weeks with a steady stream of quality-of-life updates, and this new radio queue addition looks poised to become another winner in the app’s feature cap. Of course, we can’t really gauge its usefulness until we’ve tested it for ourselves, but the idea of being able to quickly adjust a queue without backing out of it is certainly appealing.

Discovery of this feature comes shortly after Google’s announcement of improvements to its YouTube Music casting feature, another quality-of-life change that should help listeners instantly connect to their most used casting device.

Before that, the Android version of the app also received the ability to save queues as playlists, which was previously only accessible to listeners using the app on iOS. These updates, in addition to plans for a dedicated podcast section for the app, perhaps show that Google is keen to continuously add polish to YouTube Music for the foreseeable future.

Here’s hoping, then, that YouTube Music becomes even more abundant with feature and quality-of-life updates throughout the rest of this year and the next.