YouTube Music finally plays songs I actually like after I made these 7 settings changes

After a lengthy hiatus from music streaming services due to concerns over ownership, the writer returned to YouTube Music's free version after a friend's invitation to a Premium plan. While appreciative of the ad-free and background-play features, the writer found the algorithm less effective than their previous Deezer experience. To refine their listening experience, they implemented several adjustments.

First, they navigated to the Settings menu and selected Privacy & data, then enabled the Pause watch history feature to prevent non-music viewing from influencing their music mixes. They also considered creating a separate Google account for YouTube Music to further isolate their listening history from their broader YouTube activity.

For Autoplay, they chose to turn it off in the Settings menu, Playback section, to prevent the app from constantly suggesting songs based on its guesses. They utilized the thumbs-up and thumbs-down actions to provide explicit feedback, adding preferred songs to the Liked music playlist and excluding disliked tracks from future recommendations.

In the Recommendations section, they turned off Show your liked music from YouTube to ensure the playlist was limited to songs they liked within YouTube Music. They also re-visited the artist-selection screen during setup, adding a broader range of artists to reset the algorithm as needed.

To view their watch history and clear unnecessary entries, they accessed the My Activity page via myactivity.google.com or through YouTube Music settings. They deleted individual entries or utilized the Delete function for specific date ranges. Activating Restricted mode in the app settings filtered out explicit content, though the writer acknowledged its imperfect accuracy.

While YouTube Music offered a more tailored listening experience compared to other platforms, the writer yearned for an Ask Music feature that would allow them to describe their desired music and refine the playlist through follow-up prompts. Despite limitations in their region, they remained hopeful for its widespread availability soon.