Soon Vevo will use your friend's listening habits to recommend you music

Vevo App

You probably know Vevo from its extensive YouTube partnership, which is why you see plenty of the music video hosting company publishing music videos on Google's own video site.

But Vevo has had its own app for viewing its music videos for some time now, and now it's getting an extensive upgrade today as part of the company's rebrand.

As well as allowing you to create a personalised profile, which collects together your 'liked' artists and genres, the new app will use machine learning to serve up videos it thinks you might be interested in.

Social machine learning

But unlike the machine learning offered by the likes of Spotify's Discover Weekly and Pandora, Vevo's recommendations will soon look at your friends listening habits in addition to what your personal history of tunes.

This means that Vevo will theoretically serve up a song that's slightly outside of your musical tastes if enough of your Vevo friends have been listening to it.

Unfortunately this functionality is limited to Vevo friends at the moment, but we're hoping the app follows Spotify in offering Facebook integration to bring your existing friends list across.

Another piece of additional functionality is the ability to watch videos in either landscape or portrait mode, the latter of which crops both the left and the right sides of the video to fit it into a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Vevo reckons this viewing angle will work better for those people who watch music videos while using their phones while out and about, so if you're one of those people, feel free to go nuts.

Good ol' human recommendations

If you don't want to rely on a machine telling you what to listen to, Vevo is also bringing a number of curators on-board which users can follow.

Names of these curators include Daniel P Carter off BBC Radio 1 and Georgie Rogers who currently DJs for both Virgin Radio and BBC 6Music.

Vevo stressed that these changes would sit alongside its current YouTube offering, but it seems the music service is keen to get as many people as possible watching its videos on its own platform rather than Google's.

Vevo's rebranded app is available worldwide now at no cost and with no paid subscription required.

Jon Porter

Jon Porter is the ex-Home Technology Writer for TechRadar. He has also previously written for Practical Photoshop, Trusted Reviews, Inside Higher Ed, Al Bawaba, Gizmodo UK, Genetic Literacy Project, Via Satellite, Real Homes and Plant Services Magazine, and you can now find him writing for The Verge.