"We wanted to make something uniquely YouTube."

Before coming to YouTube, Fowler helped to found MOG , a widely praised music service that never achieved the same consumer traction as its rivals. "It was the Betamax of music services," Fowler says with a wry chuckle." With this app, he wanted to create an experience that was low touch but high reward, something that would appeal to a broad audience, and more importantly to a group of consumers distinct from those who have already signed up for a streaming music subscription. "I didn’t want to add in features so we could check a box just because another service has that feature," said Fowler. "We wanted to make something uniquely YouTube."

The app doesn’t try to replicate the full-featured nature of Google Play Music. You cannot, for example, create playlists. Instead YouTube music creates a daily playlist for you, "My Mix," which combines tracks you’ve listened to, tracks you’ve liked, and some new stuff it thinks you might like to discover. You can search and listen to any music for free, with ads. If you’re a YouTube Red subscriber, the ads go away and you get power features, for example that My Mix playlist is automatically saved for offline playback.

The goal, says Fowler, is to give you something that will be ready and waiting when that subway door closes and you realize you’ve forgotten to prepare your entertainment but are no longer connected to the internet. "A lot of people think of YouTube as a place you come to consume, lean forward, and then go someplace else, but we want people to have those leanback sessions," says Fowler. "It’s important for people to understand that this experience, when unlocked with Red, is deeply portable." In place of control, you get convenience.

The app will also offer up a couple genre-specific playlists based on your taste. That morning, for example, it had given Fowler a Post-Punk mix. He was particularly fond of a video it gave him from the band Low. As a former record store clerk from the Minneapolis area, Fowler is very familiar with the group, but had never heard their cover of the Rihanna hit "Stay." Below that video, the app recommended the Rihanna original, then other songs and live concerts by Low, including a cover of "Stay" they performed at the Pitchfork Music Festival. "It’s smart enough to realize that people might want to see the original, but that the person who likes this is probably more interested in hearing other songs from Low, not Rihanna."

Making the leap From Low to Rihanna and back again

When you’re on an artist page, Rihanna for example, you can browse through all her available albums and singles, just as you would on Spotify or Apple Music. You can listen to a full album, and it will play the video when one exists, and use cover art as a placeholder when one does not. If you subscribe to YouTube Red, you can play this music in the background, and choose to play it audio only if you want to save your battery and limit data consumption.

If you’re in the mood for something a little less structured, you can use the Rihanna track as the seed to kick off an infinite playlist, essentially Rihanna radio, that will cue up related songs. YouTube Music has a neat feature here, familiar to users of Rdio, that lets you adjust the variety. You can pick a station that plays mostly Rihanna and closely related artists, or one that starts with Rihanna but goes off into a more eclectic and adventurous selection from there.

A slider to adjust your stream's variety

Things can get complicated when it comes to artists whose work was mostly made in the pre-video days. You can play through every album by Harry Nilsson, but it won’t show videos for any songs, only cover art. On Nilsson’s profile page, it does show you some videos that exist on YouTube, including this stunning live performance of "Everybody’s Talking." Unfortunately it won’t sync that video up with the song when you play it from an album, because it isn’t part of the catalog YouTube licensed from the labels.