YouTube Music testing Spotify‑style genre and mood filters for playlists

YouTube Music is testing a feature that Spotify introduced years ago, but is still unavailable, removed, or broken for many users. A Reddit user on r/YoutubeMusic posted a screenshot showing genre and mood filter chips appearing directly inside playlists, including the often-chaotic Liked Songs collection.

The feature lets you tap into categories like Rock, Hip-Hop, or Chill to instantly sort your library. Click on one of those main genre chips and YouTube Music surfaces sub-genre options next to it. The filtered queue can then be saved as a brand new playlist through the “Up Next” menu, which makes organizing years of accumulated music way less painful.​

Spotify rolled out similar filters back in 2021, letting users sort their Liked Songs by genre and mood. But the feature has effectively disappeared for many people. Community forums and Reddit threads from early 2025 are flooded with complaints about the filters vanishing entirely, refusing to work, or being stripped from accounts after app updates. Some users report Spotify stopped playing Liked Songs by genre altogether, while others say their most-used filters just went missing with no explanation.

In case you need a visual refresh, here’s an official video that showed it off four years ago:

The feature appears to be rolling out as part of Google’s typical A/B testing approach. One Redditor who spotted the filters also mentioned having a separate experimental AI feature (accessed via a dice icon in the YouTube app) that adds commentary about songs and artists, similar to Spotify’s DJ mode. However, the two features don’t seem directly linked. Another user reported getting the dice experiment but not the genre filters, suggesting Google is testing multiple features independently across different user groups.​

The rollout looks like a classic Google A/B test right now. Some users are seeing the filters appear after recent app updates, while others in different regions are still waiting. One commenter from the UK mentioned they don’t even have access to the dice experiment yet. But by the end of the Reddit thread, the original poster confirmed they’d just received the feature too, suggesting Google might be expanding the test.​

For YouTube Music users drowning in unsorted Liked Songs, this could solve a problem that’s been frustrating people for years. The ability to filter playlists by mood and genre has been a frequent feature request, especially as libraries grow beyond a few hundred tracks. Whether Google commits to a full public launch or keeps this as an experiment remains to be seen.