How to Get Notifications When a Video is Added to a YouTube Playlist

Playlists are how most of us organize our favorite content. This goes for regular YouTube videos as well as YouTube Music. You might follow a 50-part programming course, a weekly podcast, or an official music label's compilation.

Another very common setup is a collaborative playlist. Maybe you and a group of friends share a common road trip mix on YouTube Music, and anyone in the group can drop in a new song whenever they find one.

But there is a big problem: how do you know when a creator or a friend actually adds something new?

Right now, your only choice is to open the playlist, scroll through the whole thing, and try to spot what changed. If you are keeping track of a few different playlists, checking them every day gets boring very quickly.

Why the notification bell does not work

You might wonder if you can just click the bell icon and subscribe to the channel.

The bell icon is helpful for normal videos, but it has some major limits for playlists.

• It alerts you to everything: If a creator uploads three gaming videos a day but only updates their coding tutorial playlist once a month, you will get spammed with gaming videos you do not care about.
• It ignores old videos: If someone adds an older video to a new playlist (like a "Best of 2020" list), YouTube will not send a notification because the video itself is not brand new.
• Collaborative playlists: If multiple friends are adding songs to a shared YouTube Music playlist, subscribing to the main creator's channel will not tell you when a friend drops a new track.

To fix this, we have to use tools outside of YouTube.

Method 1: The RSS Feed setup

If you are okay with a bit of technical work, you can force YouTube to send you alerts using a hidden RSS feed.

Here is how to set it up:

1. Open the YouTube playlist or YouTube Music playlist you want to track.
2. Look at the URL in your browser. Copy the string of letters and numbers right after list=. This is the unique Playlist ID (for example, PLABC123456789).
3. Take that ID and attach it to this hidden YouTube RSS link: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=
4. Your final link will look like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLABC123456789

Now that you have this XML feed, you can paste it into an automation tool like IFTTT or Zapier. You can tell those tools to check the link every few hours and send you an email or a Slack message when a new video or song appears.

The catch: This method is free, but you have to sign up for third-party automation tools and build the connection yourself. If the RSS feed changes or hits a rate limit, the alerts will stop working.

Method 2: Automated tracking

If you do not want to mess around with RSS feeds and Zapier accounts, you can use a tracking tool built specifically for this issue.

That is why we created Playlist Guard. While many people use it to find the names of deleted videos, it is also built to monitor additions to any public playlist.

Here is how it works:

1. Paste your YouTube or YouTube Music playlist link into your Playlist Guard dashboard. (This also fully supports your private YouTube Liked Videos and YouTube Music Liked Music automatically!)
2. Let the app do the rest.

Playlist Guard scans the playlist in the background. Whenever a creator uploads a new video, or a friend adds a new song to your shared group mix, the app spots the change right away. It then sends a simple email directly to your inbox so you know exactly what was added.

You never have to check the playlist manually, and you avoid getting spammed by unrelated uploads.

Stop wasting time refreshing your pages. Try out Playlist Guard and get your playlist updates sent directly to you.