YouTube Music will now display play counts for popular songs

YouTube Music might not be the best streaming service available now, but it has come a long way since it was launched. Google is constantly adding the latest features to improve its platform. The most recent ones added by the platform were real-time lyrics along with song credits. With the latest news, another feature, “play counts,” is all set to be introduced on the platform.

This feature will not only display how many times you’ve listened to a song, but it’ll also display the number of times a song has been shared by users all over the platform. This feature will work similarly to Spotify, as it will display the count when you open an artist landing page, although this page will only show this info for the top-listed tracks. But you can’t view it for the rest of the songs, as it’s just displaying it for the most popular content.

This latest feature is spotted in the app and web versions of the app, and it’s also available in YouTube app version 6.03.51 in the US. But this app is certainly more of a server-side change than just being available on a specific update. It will hopefully be available to all users in the coming weeks.

The Top Songs section on an artist’s landing page doesn’t always display the artist’s top songs in order according to the play counts, which is an interesting finding. For instance, Ms. Jackson, which has received 592 million plays, is classified #1 among Outcast’s greatest songs; Outcast, which has received 708 million plays, is listed second.

On the one hand, this is simply a small step towards giving YouTube Music feature parity with Spotify, but on the other, it’s a much-needed tool that enables new listeners to find an artist’s most well-known songs. People won’t need to use a Chrome plugin to force play counts to appear, at the very least.