No ads even for free users in YouTube Music with the new Samples feature

If you ever find yourself in the TV show Wheel of Fortune and your task is to guess “Which mobile app feeds users with short-run audio-visual content?”, you’re gonna have a hard time solving that puzzle. Is it TikTok? Is it Facebook’s/Instagram’s Reels? Could it be Snapchat’s Spotlight? Maybe YouTube Shorts?

For there is another one now. YouTube Music is rolling out a new feature called Samples (via 9to5Google).

YouTube’s separate music-centric application has been downloaded more than a billion times and has 4.5/5 review stars from almost 5 million people – the formula has worked nicely for parent company Google. YouTube Music hasn’t seen many changes throughout the years, but this new Samples feature is about to bring a major refresh.

Let’s take a sample

What’s it all about? Samples, as Google puts it, is exclusive only on YouTube Music and offers a way to “Discover new music with a swipe”. It’s placed between the Home and Explore tabs at the bottom of the screen. Wait, what’s the Explore tab for then, if not for discovering new music?

Things get a little more specific with Samples. This new feature will be focused on professional, somewhat higher-quality video production in contrast with current Shorts, which are user-generated and on the amateur side.

Samples, in brief, will concentrate on bringing you personalized audio-visual productions from major artists and labels. Samples will not just play you a 30-second music clip from the start, it’s said to bring you the juicy parts of a song, so don’t be surprised if Imagine Dragons’ next hit starts from the middle in your Samples tab. The emphasis will be on polished official music videos, but expect some upbeat excerpts from live shows, too.

Like anything in 2023, Samples will offer this chopped content in a vertical crop, because by the time you manage to turn your phone in landscape, the clip may be very well over. Here’s what it looks like:


The original article says that no ads are to pop up in the Samples feed, both for Premium and free users. Yours truly has updated its YouTube Music app as we’re speaking, but no Samples tab is present at the moment, so an adless free user experience can’t be confirmed at this point. The Samples feature will be available on Android and iOS for users all across the world.

Speaking of the Samples feed, it’s going to be personalized to your music tastes, so Dire Straits fans should not be tempted by Cardi B suggestions, but the feature is brand new, so we’ll have to wait and see what Google’s algorithms have in store.

On the usability side, when you give a Sample a like, it will allegedly save the audio version to your existing Liked Music playlist, with “Play” starting the music video in the usual Now Playing UI. A dislike option is not present, since once you see something in Samples and “remove it” by swiping up for the next thing to appear, the swiped-away Sample shouldn’t be shown to you again. The currently playing Sample will loop until you move to the next thing.