YouTube Music is one of the most popular platforms for streaming your favorite tunes. Bundled with YouTube Premium, the service offers an extensive catalog, including unofficial covers and unreleased tracks you may not find elsewhere. However, its desktop UI was too basic for the longest time, mimicking a mobile design on large screens. Fortunately, the company has finally addressed this by optimizing YouTube Music’s web layout — particularly when viewing albums and playlists.

As per a 9to5Google report, YouTube Music is rolling out a redesigned, two-column UI for albums and playlists on the web. The first column highlights the album art, year, and description, in addition to handy buttons like play, download, share, and more. The second column, on the other hand, lists the included tracks, along with their play count, duration, and artist.

Before this update, YouTube Music on the web would cram the first column’s content at the top of the screen, followed by the second column’s song list. That wasted desktops’ screen real estate, as the margins were too broad and unutilized. The new UI takes better advantage of wider displays by condensing more information in the same view.

YouTube Music first adopted this optimized album and playlist UI on Android tablets (but not iPadOS). While the company has already started rolling it out to desktop users, it’s not yet available to everyone. If it hasn’t appeared on your end, you could try clearing the website’s cache.

Despite lagging behind music streaming juggernauts like Spotify and Apple Music, YouTube Music has come along quite nicely over the past few years. However, some of the app's features aren't consistent across all platforms. For example, while the Android and iOS versions of YouTube Music can pick up where you left off after closing and reopening the app including for songs and podcasts this functionality does not currently exist for the app's web version. Thankfully, that appears to be changing now as part of a recent change.

We’re expecting some big AI announcements in the coming days, as both OpenAI and Google have events scheduled this week. While ChatGPT could become more of a search engine, Google could be looking to integrate more of Gemini into its ecosystem. Google has been testing a Gemini Extension for YouTube Music, which we have previously detailed with a demo video. Now, we have a better idea of its functionality with a list of commands that Gemini will accept for YouTube Music.

Android Authority contributor Assemble Debug spotted that Google has added official documentation on connecting YouTube Music to Gemini apps. The documentation states that YouTube Music isn’t available in Gemini in Google Messages and that the extension works with English prompts only for now.

The race for AI has been underway for years, but ChatGPT pushed the industry from a marathon to a sprint. ChatGPT’s arrival caught Google somewhat off-guard, and the company has since doubled down on its AI efforts under the Gemini rebrand. One way Gemini could reach critical mass is to attract more users who are already present within the Google ecosystem, and Gemini Extensions could achieve this with tighter ecosystem integration. Google has been testing a Gemini Extension for YouTube Music that we have detailed previously, and we now have a better demo video to share with you on how it will work when it rolls out.

Android Authority contributor Assemble Debug managed to activate a new Gemini Extension for YouTube Music in the Google app v15.17.28.29.arm64. With some more work, we got the extension working well enough for a demo.

The race for AI has been underway for years, but ChatGPT pushed the industry from a marathon to a sprint. ChatGPT’s arrival caught Google somewhat off-guard, and the company has since doubled down on its AI efforts under the Gemini rebrand. One way Gemini could reach critical mass is to attract more users who are already present within the Google ecosystem, and Gemini Extensions could achieve this with tighter ecosystem integration. Google has been testing a Gemini Extension for YouTube Music that we have detailed previously, and we now have a better demo video to share with you on how it will work when it rolls out.

Android Authority contributor Assemble Debug managed to activate a new Gemini Extension for YouTube Music in the Google app v15.17.28.29.arm64. With some more work, we got the extension working well enough for a demo.

The race for AI has been underway for years, but ChatGPT pushed the industry from a marathon to a sprint. ChatGPT’s arrival caught Google somewhat off-guard, and the company has since doubled down on its AI efforts under the Gemini rebrand. One way Gemini could reach critical mass is to attract more users who are already present within the Google ecosystem, and Gemini Extensions could achieve this with tighter ecosystem integration. Google has been testing a Gemini Extension for YouTube Music that we have detailed previously, and we now have a better demo video to share with you on how it will work when it rolls out.

Android Authority contributor Assemble Debug managed to activate a new Gemini Extension for YouTube Music in the Google app v15.17.28.29.arm64. With some more work, we got the extension working well enough for a demo.

While YouTube Music may not be as big as Spotify or Apple Music, the service continues its efforts to become a viable competitor. Although big features like podcasts only made it to the app less than a year ago, developers behind the streaming service have been busy at work testing new visual elements for YouTube Music. Then in December, we learned that Google could introduce large buttons in the overflow menu to shrink the long list of controls. These enlarged buttons for Play next, Save to playlist, and Share, are now widely making it to YouTube Music on Android.