YouTube Music upgrades Ask Music into a chat across 300 million songs and podcasts

YouTube Music listeners found an artist new to them over 450 million times in July 2026.

That’s the number YouTube led with on September 23, 2026, when it announced 2 AI features at Made on YouTube: an upgraded Ask Music, and a new AI podcast guide called Your Podcast Lineup.

Ask Music now works like a chat. You describe what you want in plain words, and it searches more than 300 million songs plus podcasts. Both features are “coming soon” to YouTube Music and Premium subscribers worldwide, and YouTube hasn’t given a date.

What Ask Music on YouTube Music can do after the 2026 update

Ask Music isn’t brand new. It first showed up in 2025 as an AI radio you could describe in a sentence.

The 2026 version goes a lot further. According to TechCrunch, you can now:

• Build a custom queue from a description, like a mix of the tracks that inspired a song
• Ask about a song, like who played bass on it or how it was made
• Dig into an artist’s backstory, what YouTube calls “artist lore”

The catalog it searches covers official studio recordings, remixes, live performances, covers and DJ sets, per the YouTube Blog post by T. Jay Fowler, Senior Director of Product Management at YouTube Music.

YouTube’s own promo image shows the kind of prompts it has in mind: “who produced this?”, “where’s this hook from?” and “make me a Euro summer mix”. The screen also carries a small line at the bottom: “Ask Music can make mistakes.”

What Your Podcast Lineup on YouTube Music does

Your Podcast Lineup is the second feature, and it’s built for podcasts. It sits on the podcast page of the YouTube Music app.

Once a week it plays you a short spoken preview of recommended shows. It explains why you might like each one, then jumps straight into the suggested episodes.

YouTube describes it as “completely eyes-optional and hands-free”. TechCrunch pointed out that Spotify has been moving the same way with its own AI-generated podcast feature.

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From crate digging to curating, discovering your next podcast obsession or favorite underground artist should be easy.

How YouTube Music’s Ask Music compares with Talk to Spotify

Spotify put a chat inside its app earlier this year. Talk to Spotify launched in beta on July 14, 2026, for Premium users in the US, Ireland and Sweden only.

YouTube is pitching the new Ask Music as a worldwide rollout, though without a date.

Both work the same basic way: you ask for music by describing it, not by typing an artist name. Spotify has also offered prompted playlists since January 2026.

One thing to know if you release music: a question like “who played bass on this?” needs credit data behind the answer. YouTube hasn’t said where Ask Music pulls those credits from.