The announcement of YouTube music
YouTube will launch its music subscription service this Tuesday, May 22, in a number of international markets. The service named, YouTube Music, will replace Google Play Music. This poses the service as a rival to Spotify, Pandora, Tidal and Apple music. The blog announcement follows the company’s recent addition of songwriter, label and publisher credits to music on YouTube. The service will be available in USA, Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and 13 other European countries.
Features
The service will be available as an ad-supported free subscription plan and as an ad-free Premium plan for $9.99 per month. YouTube is planning to create its own mobile app and desktop player. It comes with features such as personalized playlists based on users’ YouTube Music taste. It will also, provide recommendations based on people’s listening history. This is pretty similar to music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. YouTube Music will include the official versions of millions of songs, albums, artist radio and its trademark music videos. It will also include instrumental music, covers, and remixes of several songs. It will also, suggest songs in case users have no clue about they are looking for, this will be done with Google’s search algorithms. This will be presented in an organized and personalized manner on its homepage.
This is not YouTube’s first attempt at releasing a music subscription service. In 2014, it launched YouTube Music Key, which offered ad-free and offline streaming for $9.99 per month. It was an app that offered ad-supported music streaming with a compulsory YouTube Red subscription.
YouTube highlighted that Tuesday’s release of its music subscription will be a soft launch and the service will keep improvising over the coming weeks.
