YouTube Music’s AI radio officially gets a name: here’s what you can “Ask Music” to do

Ask Music is coming to your YouTube Premium membership

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Would you like to turn any musical idea into a custom YouTube Music station? All you need to do is Ask Music. That’s the new name for the AI-powered radio station creator,which was piloted in July by YouTubeand is now rolling out to some English-language users on Android.

The feature is still officially in testing, but according to9to5Google, it appears to be turning up in more and more people’s apps, albeit not on iOS; it’s appeared for Android users in the US, Canada and Australia at the time of writing.

Why Ask Music could make your music more entertaining

Ask Music is another one of Google’s generative AI experiments (seehum-to-searchandGemini integrationtesting for others) and in this incarnation it enables you to describe the kind of music you’d like to hear – melancholy indie rock, perhaps, or Seattle rock scene, or jangly 60s pop – to have YouTube Music create a custom station playing exactly that. You can describe your music by genre or by characteristics such as epic choruses, or both: upbeat pop, angry metal and so on.

The use of generative AI trained on a huge dataset means this feature could be really useful, particularly if you’re picky: being able to create playlists based on very specific and personalized criteria should mean much more meaningful results featuring much more music that you’ll want to hear. Let’s be honest, other people’s playlists can be pretty patchy, so the introduction of AI to YouTube Music’s discovery features could prove really interesting.

As yet there’s no sign of an official rollout to everybody, but the launch is clearly coming closer, so if it isn’t already in your Android app it shouldn’t be long before it makes an appearance. One thing is for certain: YouTube Music really is starting to make a play for inclusion in ourbest music streaming servicesguide…

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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.

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