YouTube Music finally adds ‘Mark as played’ for podcasts

In addition to announcing sound search and AI-generated conversation radio today, YouTube Music is rolling out “Mark as played” for podcasts.

When you open the overflow menu for a podcast episode, “Mark as played” or “Mark as unplayed” will appear. A toast message — “Episode marked as played” — confirms the action. It appears everywhere except for the Now Playing UI, which would be nice if you decide you’re done with an episode.

Google first teased this feature in December of 2023 and said it would be available “in the coming months.” It’s now here seven months later.

This simple feature is just a basic element of podcasting clients that helps manage your library/queue. It’s wild that this was not on the initial list of features when podcasts rolled out to YTM. Previously, your only workaround was starting a podcast and manually dragging the scrubber to the very end.

We’re seeing Mark as played in YouTube Music for Android, iOS, and the web (which appears to have lost its persistent miniplayer in recent days).

Hopefully, new episode notifications are next.

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