YouTube Music personalized daily playlists bring it closer to Spotify

With Google Play Music officially behind it, YouTube Music can now better focus on growing its user base and features. The latter may involve catching up quickly with the current king of music streaming, Spotify (or Apple Music for some). The service's new features bring it closer to that goal, with a daily selection of music collected and personalized for every user, pretty much like Spotify's Daily Mix.

Google is the king of targeted and personalized results based on user data and machine learning. It's not surprising, then, that YouTube Music would put that to work in its personalized recommendation system. It definitely needs all the help it can get if it wants to quickly close the gap with Spotify who has been using personalized mixes for a long time now.

YouTube Music's My Mix playlists are based on the same concept. It offers seven new and distinct lists that are grouped based on certain categories so that each of the seven is unique. Additionally, YouTube Music renames Your Mix to My Supermix as one long list that combines all these into what the service describes as an "eclectic listening experience."

Going beyond just personalize playlists, however, YouTube Music is also introducing lists based on four featured activities. If you're in the mood to discover new Workout, Focus, Relax, and Commute tunes, the Home tab will offer easy access to these categories.

YouTube Music still has a lot of work to do to be regarded as a threat to Spotify's reign. The latter has had years to fill its library and train its algorithms and while YouTube Music has Google's AI chops to lean on, it also has to build more trust in the service, especially after Google Play Music subscribers were burned by the service's demise.