Why it matters: YouTube is easily one of the most popular websites out there. On the video hosting side alone, the top YouTube videos can quickly garner hundreds of millions of views. However, the YouTube brand that we know of today encompasses more than just user-uploaded videos: with services like YouTube Music, the Google-owned company has spread its influence to other forms of media as well. Today, the already-solid Music platform is getting even better.
In a newly-published blog post, the YouTube Music team announced a new feature that lets its mobile app users (on iOS and Android) "seamlessly" switch between song playback and corresponding music videos. So, if you're midway through a song and suddenly decide you'd like to watch its official video, you can simply tap the "Video" button at the top to do so.
The YouTube Music crew says they have time-matched over "five million" official music videos to their audio-only counterparts. While that's certainly a lot of supported content, it still doesn't encompass every single song in the YouTube Music library, so don't be surprised if a few of your favorite tracks don't have this functionality available yet.
The YouTube Music crew says they have time-matched over "five million" official music videos to their audio-only counterparts.
Of course, it should also be noted that not every song even has an accompanying music video, so if you don't see the "Video" button at all, that could be why.
Regardless, if the feature is available, YouTube promises you can "flip back and forth" between pure audio and video as many times as you want without "[missing] a beat." Do you hate the frustrating background sounds in a particular scene of a music video? Switch to audio-only until that part is over.
If you aren't a big fan of music videos in general (which is understandable – they tend to have a lot of extra, unnecessary noise), YouTube has you covered. If you visit the Music app's settings menu, there should be a new "Don't play music videos" toggle, which removes this feature entirely.