YouTube Rumored to be Launching a Streaming Music Service

YouTube is the biggest piracy platform out there, make no mistake about it. While some labels have gone to great measures to complain about Spotify and keep their wares off the service, pirated versions of hundreds of thousands of songs live on YouTube and those numbers dwarf torrents. Don’t believe me? Type the name of your favorite band and any of their songs into YouTube and see what comes up. The rights holders aren’t getting paid at all for this, yet labels and artists constantly complain about low Spotify payouts.

But now it seems as if YouTube wants to offer a legitimate streaming option to go head-to-head with Spotify, according to a Billboard report release on Wednesday, but with video. Google, YouTube’s parent company, already has deals in place with music rights holders for its Google Play Music service, one less obstacle to cross. The YouTube service is expected to launch by the end of the year and have both free and premium options, like Spotify.

“But YouTube is already free. Why would I pay for a premium YouTube player?” you ask. It’s all in the interface: if the UI made it easier to search for and find music, you could easily stream full albums, you didn’t have to deal with ads, and the interface was portable to your mobile devices (including caching for offline listening) it might be worth paying $10/month for.

What does this mean for metal? Like Google Play Music, I’d expect the service will have more metal on it than Spotify. Even though most metal labels are now (finally) on Spotify, some of those labels only make part of their catalogues available, and there are still some holdouts. EVERYONE is on YouTube. And it’s got a built-in user-base: everyone uses YouTube.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Thanks: Hetal