Technology

YouTube Music might let you know when a song is a cover

The experience of listening to YouTube music wasn’t always pleasing. Some of its latest updates are adding value to the platform. A recent update to the platform brought in real-time lyrics for certain songs. With the latest upcoming update, YouTube Music is planning to add the latest feature to the platform that other platforms might not have. This latest feature will tell you if a song is a cover without searching in its credits.

A Reddit user discovered that YouTube Music has designated the Swedish band Ghost’s “Jesus, He Knows Me” as a cover when they looked for it earlier today. But when they visited the album page, that label was no longer there. For those who are unfamiliar with the song, Genesis first released it in 1991; however, Ghost gave it a new interpretation this year. The over a million views the cover has received on YouTube may have encouraged the streaming provider to add the label.

During our tests, we were unable to get YouTube Music to match the label with this song. We experimented with a couple others, but the results were inconsistent. When looking for “Tainted Love,” we discovered that while the radio station that plays the song features Cover, the song itself doesn’t have the label. The same song, covered by Milky Chance, wasn’t labelled either, although the associated radio station was.

We have tried searching various covers; some are labelled with the latest feature, and some aren’t. It seems like this feature is in the process of incorporating these labels into the platform, or it might be just testing the latest feature. There are a huge number of covers all over the platform, and it looks like it’ll take a while for them to expand.

Along with that, if you’ve already listened to a lot of covers and now you’re looking for more, YouTube Music’s recommended album feature is right there to take you into a whole new stream of music.