New Apple Music and YouTube Music playlists aim to keep you listening for longer

As music streaming services battle it out for more market share, one of the key weapons in the fight are recommended playlists – those auto-generated lists of tracks that save you the trouble of picking your own songs, and introduce you to new artists.

In order to better compete with Spotify, both YouTube Music and Apple Music have just rejigged the playlists that they offer users, so if you'd previously found their offerings rather stale, now might be the time to take another look.

First up is YouTube Music, with a new playlist called Released, that seems to directly match Spotify's New Music Friday playlist. As its name suggests, it features newly released songs – 50 of them in fact.

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YouTube Music describes the playlist as "the hottest 50 songs this week, served up fresh to you every Friday", and it's separate from the New Release Mix that YouTube Music also offers (which is more geared towards your previous listening history).

Play it again

Not to be left out, Apple Music has rolled out a New Music Daily playlist that – you guessed it – serves up new tunes every single day, so you can start every morning with a selected pick of what's new on the music scene.

Apple Music describes the playlist as "the latest must-hear songs" and the first one we got access to was 62 songs long. It replaces the Best of the Week playlist (though obviously will get refreshed more often).

With new material out from Taylor Swift on both streaming services this week, it's a good time to introduce a playlist featuring new tracks, which is probably something both YouTube Music and Apple Music took into consideration.

Bear in mind that as with any automatically refreshed playlist, you'll need to save the songs out to your own library if you want to remember what they are, as they'll be replaced every day or every week.