YouTube Music is testing full-screen album art, but you can't use it yet

YouTube Music is an excellent app for streaming music: it’s free (if you don’t mind the ads), and it’s bundled with YouTube Premium, so you get two things for the price of one. It’s also really good with recommendations and almost always gets the next track right. However, if there’s one thing some of us don’t like about the YouTube Music experience, it’s the Now Playing screen. Fortunately, it looks like Google is testing a change to improve its appearance.

Look, there’s nothing really wrong with YouTube Music’s Now Playing screen, but the tiny album art looks outdated. It’s a relatively minor gripe, but it’s glaringly obvious, especially now that apps like Apple Music have switched to full-screen album art and even animated album art on their Now Playing screens.

According to a screenshot shared by Telegram user Hamada, it seems Google is finally testing full-screen album art in YouTube Music. Needless to say, it looks quite good and is definitely a big step up from the small thumbnail.

It’s worth noting that this appears to be a limited test, so you may or may not have access to the feature right now. We checked across all our devices and multiple YouTube accounts, but couldn’t get the full-screen album art to show up. It’s not very surprising, however, since Google frequently runs limited tests and A/B tests for new features before rolling them out or quietly killing them.

It’s possible that full-screen album art in YouTube Music never goes beyond the limited test it is currently in. However, we really hope that Google doesn’t abandon this feature and rolls it out more widely sooner rather than later.