Your YouTube Music listening history lives in the History section of the app and the web player. Tap or click your profile picture and open History (in the app it sits under Settings, Privacy & location, Manage watch history) to see a running list of everything you have played. The same list also controls what shows up in your recommendations, and it can be searched, cleared, or paused whenever you want.

Quick note on wording, because the search term "youtube history of music" pulls in two very different crowds. Some people want music-history documentaries and lessons about the history of music. This article is not that. This is about your personal listening history on YouTube Music: the songs and videos you have actually played, and how to view, search, delete, or export them.

Where your YouTube Music history actually lives

Here is the part that trips people up. YouTube Music does not keep a separate, private "listening log" that is walled off from the rest of Google. Your plays are stored as watch history on your Google Account, and that history is shared between YouTube and YouTube Music. Google says this plainly in its help docs: "Watch history settings are shared between YouTube and YouTube Music." Pause it in one place and it pauses in the other. Clear it in one place and it clears everywhere.

That is why you will see the words "watch history" instead of "listening history" once you get into Settings, even though on YouTube Music you are mostly playing audio. Same underlying data, different label.

There are really three layers to your activity:

Knowing which layer you are touching matters, because clearing one does not always clear the others.

How to see your history in the YouTube Music app

On Android or iPhone, open the app and tap your profile picture in the top right. The fastest way to the full log is:

  1. Tap your profile picture, then Settings.
  2. Choose Privacy & location.
  3. Tap Manage watch history.

That opens your history as a reverse-chronological list, newest plays first. You can scroll back through it, and you can remove individual entries by tapping the X (or the delete icon) next to any track. Google's own YouTube Music Help page confirms this is where viewing and deleting live.

The app also surfaces a lighter version of your history on the home and library screens as "Recently played," which is handy for jumping back into something, but the Manage watch history view is the complete record.

How to see your history on the web (music.youtube.com)

The desktop web player makes this even quicker. Go to music.youtube.com, then click your avatar in the top-right corner and select History. You get a chronological list of the tracks you have listened to, laid out like a playlist.

From that web view you can also clean things up. Right-click any song and choose Remove from history to delete a single track. To wipe everything, open Settings, go to the Privacy tab, click Clear watch history, and confirm with the CLEAR WATCH HISTORY button. Be aware that this resets your recommendations across every device signed in to that account, so the "made for you" mixes will start rebuilding from scratch.

There is no dedicated search box inside the History view itself, which surprises people who want to hunt down one specific song they played months ago. Two workarounds do the job:

My Activity is the honest answer to "how do I search my YouTube Music history," because it is built for searching and the in-app History view really is not.

How to clear or delete your YouTube Music history

You have already seen the manual options above. To recap the ways to clear or delete:

If you would rather stop logging plays going forward instead of deleting the past, use Pause watch history. In the app that is Settings, Privacy & location, then toggle Pause watch history. On the web it is Settings, Privacy, Pause watch history. While paused, new plays will not be recorded or used to shape your recommendations. Remember that this toggle is shared with regular YouTube, so pausing here pauses your video watch history too.

Getting the full picture: exporting your history with Google Takeout

The in-app History view is fine for a quick look, but it is not a complete or exportable archive. If you want your real, full listening record as a file you can keep, use Google Takeout.

Head to takeout.google.com, deselect everything, then select only YouTube and YouTube Music. Before you export, open the format options and switch History from HTML to JSON. When the export arrives, the file you want is watch-history.json inside the YouTube folder. That JSON holds a timestamped record of what you played, which is far more useful than screenshots of a scrolling list.

One honest caveat worth flagging: some users report that the Takeout YouTube Music history export can be incomplete or missing older entries, and Google has an open community thread about exactly that. It is still the best official export available, just do not assume it is a perfect play-by-play going back to day one.

This also explains a limitation that catches developers off guard. The official YouTube Data API exposes your liked videos, playlists, and subscriptions, but it does not expose your YouTube Music listening history or per-track play counts. The old watch-history API endpoint was deprecated years ago. So if you want true "top songs by number of plays," the Takeout file is the source of that truth, not the API. We get into what you can and cannot see about your own account in how to see your YouTube Music stats.

Turning your history into permanent stats: youtube-music-history-scrobbler tools

Here is where a whole cottage industry of open-source tools comes in. If you search "youtube-music-history-scrobbler" you will find several GitHub projects built to take your YouTube Music history and push it to Last.fm, which then keeps permanent, always-on stats of everything you listen to. This is the same idea as scrobbling, the long-running practice of logging every track you play to build a lifetime music profile.

There are two broad flavors of these tools.

The first is the one-time import. A project like beebls/youtube-music-history-scrobbler reads the watch-history.json file from your Google Takeout export, filters it down to real songs (the entries from "Artist Name - Topic" channels), and formats them so you can bulk-upload them to Last.fm. It even queries YouTube for album metadata to fill in the gaps. Good for backfilling everything you have already listened to. Just know that Last.fm caps bulk scrobbles at 3,000 per day, so a large history has to be uploaded in batches over a few days.

The second flavor is the always-on scrobbler. Projects like luisignaciocc/ytmusic-scrobbler-web run a background worker that checks your YouTube history every few minutes and sends new plays to Last.fm automatically, so from then on your listening is tracked in real time without you doing anything. The tradeoff is setup: these tools usually need you to hand over your YouTube Music session headers, which is more technical and sits in a grayer area of YouTube's terms than the official Takeout route.

If a permanent, searchable, always-updating history is what you actually want, this is the honest path to it, and Last.fm becomes the home for those stats. We compare the options in the best Last.fm scrobblers. Once your plays are flowing into Last.fm, you get proper top-artist and top-track charts that YouTube Music alone will not give you outside of its year-end Recap.

The short version

For a quick look, open History from your profile menu in the app or on music.youtube.com. To search or manage it properly, use My Activity. To delete, clear individual tracks or wipe everything from the Privacy settings, and pause history if you want to stop logging. And for a complete, permanent record, export watch-history.json with Google Takeout and feed it to a Last.fm scrobbler. If you also use Spotify, you can check your Spotify listening stats any time with Music Profile Viewer.

Also on Spotify? Music Profile Viewer is our free Spotify stats tool. Open the Spotify profile viewer to see your top artists and tracks across every time range, any day of the year.

It uses official read-only sign in and stores nothing. To be clear, it reads Spotify only. It does not connect to YouTube Music or show your YouTube listening history.

Sources and further reading