YouTube Music might finally be catching up to Spotify with this new feature

I’ve tried switching over to YouTube Music multiple times in the past, and while it’s a good music streaming platform, there’s always been one thing that sends me crawling back to Spotify: the lack of cross-device music synchronization.

That’s the ability to start listening to a song or playlist on your desktop, then seamlessly switch over to your phone — whether it’s an iPhone or Android — and pick up exactly where you left off. It’s a feature YouTube Music has sorely lacked for years, even as its biggest competitors, Spotify and Apple Music, have offered it for ages.

However, thanks to a new update, that finally seems set to change.

YouTube Music has recently begun rolling out an update that adds cross-device synchronization (via 9to5Google), allowing you to start listening to YouTube Music on your desktop and then continue right where you left off on your phone (or vice versa), without losing your place in your playlist or the song you’re listening to.

Better late than never

It’s great to see, but YouTube Music should have added this ages ago

YouTube Music has reportedly started rolling out this change through a server-side update, so if you don’t see it yet, you should hopefully have access soon.

As for how YouTube Music’s implementation works, it’s quite simple. When you start listening to music on one device — whether that’s your phone, tablet, or PC — and then switch to another, the last song you played will automatically appear, and in your music queue, instead of showing the artist’s information, you’ll see a message that says “From your browser” or “From your iPhone,” depending on which device you’re coming from.

So if you use YouTube Music as your main music streaming platform, this should make listening across all your devices much easier.

As I mentioned earlier, Spotify has had this feature for years, and it’s one of the features I rely on most. I regularly switch from listening to music at my desktop to my phone when I’m heading out for a run or hopping in the car with Apple CarPlay — and having my music stay perfectly in sync from my PC to my phone has always been incredibly handy.

Now that YouTube Music finally has this capability, it could make people on the fence about trying the platform much more inclined to give it a shot, and, of course, make current users quite happy.

One advantage YouTube Music already has is that it’s bundled with YouTube Premium. So if you’re already paying for Premium to escape the ad-infestation that YouTube has become, then you already have full access to ad-free YouTube Music and its extensive library of songs and playlists.

Overall, while I’m happy this feature is finally here, I’m still a little shocked it took YouTube Music this long to implement such a basic feature that both Spotify and Apple Music have had practically since their inception. But I suppose it’s better late than never.