YouTube Music Gets Redesigned Now Playing and Real-Time Lyrics

Google has quietly updated YouTube Music a few times over the past week, adding a redesigned Now Playing screen, real-time lyrics, and more.

Unfortunately, I can’t find an announcement post explaining what’s up, but the changes are quite noticeable in the mobile versions of the app. The Now Playing screen now has larger album art and a carousel of options above the scrubber that include Like and Dislike toggles, Comments, Save to Playlist, Share, Download/Downloaded, and Radio options. You scroll between these choices by swiping left and right.

A few of those options were previously available on the Now Playing screen, but most were only made visible when you tapped the album art. But Comments is new: it brings up a Comments pane, providing a social media-like feed of comments that other music fans posted on YouTube (the video service) with the ability to add your own comment.

As for the real-time lyrics, YouTube Music sports a slide-up shade at the bottom of Now Playing that has long offered Up Next, Lyrics, and Related tabs. But the lyrics now work as they do in Spotify and other music apps by animating so that the current lyrics are always visible as the song progresses and are colored white. You can also scroll through the lyrics and tap on any lyrics to fast forward or rewind playback to that part in the song.

For all I know, there are other new features. But Google has provided a YouTube Music new features update since the middle of August. Whatever, these are nice additions.