If you were going to reinvent MTV for a mobile generation, you'd probably come up with something like YouTube Music. It's a video-first music service that also plays in the background like you'd expect a music app to do. That sets it apart from other music apps out there, many of which give you a choice of videos or songs, but not interchangeably.
The YouTube Music app is free for iPhone and for Android.
When you first launch YouTube Music, you will need to log into your Google account and opt in for the 14-day free trial of YouTube Red, which you and then extend another month in YouTube Music's settings.
But while YouTube Music offers a lot of interesting features, most of them require a subscription to the new YouTube Red service, which will set you back $10 a month -- $13 if you sign up through YouTube's iPhone app. Without Red, YouTube Music will play ads similar to what you see on YouTube proper, and several other functions won't work at all.
YouTube Music is first and foremost a music-video app, albeit one that doesn't forget that most people will be using it on their phones. For those times you'd rather just listen instead of watching, you can hit a toggle that switches the app to audio-only mode, which turns off the video playback and swaps in a still image. You can even turn off the screen and keep listening while you do something else.
YouTube Music is far less cluttered than competing services like Apple Music, which has more lists and tabs than you'll know what to do with. YouTube Music keeps the tabs to three -- home, hot (trending videos), and thumbs up (your favorites).
Home offers recommended videos, and it's easy to find something playable. Your mileage may vary with the "hot" tab; it didn't do much for me, although I'm usually a bit out of sync with the mainstream.
Finally, there's one more fun feature, which is called "offline mixtape." It automatically saves 20 audio-only songs for you based on your tastes, for when you know you're going to get spotty reception. I wish it saved the videos instead of just the audio, but this will keep the tunes turning in a pinch. Alas, offline mixtapes are disabled in the ad-supported version of YouTube Music.
When you are listening to a song, you'll see the video playing in a box in the top half of your screen. Rotate your screen to landscape to view in fullscreen. When in portrait mode, you'll see Playing Now and Explore tabs. Playing Now shows information about the video and shows the next five songs in the playlist YouTube Music generated, which it calls a station.
Also on the Now Playing tab, you'll find like and dislike buttons for the video currently playing along with a like button just below those for the station the app created. Next to the like button for the station is a slider-controls button that provides a slider to adjust the station variety, from less variety to balanced to more variety. If you are listening to a playlist from the trending tab, the station variety slider button is replaced by a shuffle button.
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