YouTube Music lets you create your own custom radio stations
Google gives YouTube Music users the ability to create custom stations based on specific artists and fine-tune how the algorithm decides which songs to play. Dubbed the “Radio Builder,” the feature rolled out on Tuesday and can be accessed by scrolling to the “Your Music Tuner” section of the YouTube Music home page in the iOS or Android app.
When building your custom station, you can select up to 30 artists and choose whether you want to hear music only from them or whether you want it to pull in songs from similar musicians. You can also tell it to play songs you know, new songs or a mix of the two and add filters so you can fine-tune the mix. For example, you could create a station that plays upbeat new releases from Eden, Khalid, and Pup or a station that serves your favorite soft deep-cuts from Boygenius and its members’ solo catalogs.
YouTube started testing this feature last year, and it’s nice to see that it will stick. While YouTube Music already had plenty of algorithmic stations and mixes, having stations and mixes you can control seems like a great option for when you want to listen to something specific but don’t feel like manually setting up a playlist.
You can use the feature, which is available wherever you download YouTube Music, whether you’re a paid subscriber or a free user, said Google spokesperson Paul Pennington.