YouTube Launches Music Streaming Service “YouTube Music Key”
YouTube has been the #1 music streaming destination for years now, although it hasn’t really acted like it: it’s just been a hodge-podge of music videos, official track uploads, unauthorized fan uploads and covers. But YouTube is overwhlemingly where people have been going to stream music, moreso than Spotify or any other service. Now, after months (years?) of rumors, YouTube is officially stepping into the streaming game by offering a centralized interface that brings its already robust streaming offerings together all in one place.
From YouTube’s Official Blog:
Starting today, you’ll see a new home just for music on your YouTube app for Android, iOS and on YouTube.com that shows your favorite music videos, recommended music playlists based on what you’re into and playlists of trending music across YouTube. You can find a playlist to perfectly fit your mood, whether that’s a morning motivators playlist or Boyce Avenue YouTube Mix. Check out the newest songs from channels you subscribe to, like FKA twigs or Childish Gambino. Or quickly find the songs you’ve played over and over and over again.
Full albums in high quality audio that are easy on your bandwidth
If a song exists in this world, you can probably find it on YouTube. But until today you couldn’t easily find and play full albums. In the coming days, you’ll be able to see an artist’s discography on YouTube, and play a full album with both their official music videos and high-quality songs our music partners added to YouTube.
Introducing YouTube Music Key beta
You’ve asked us for ways to listen to music without ads, to keep playing music videos even if you lock the screen or start using another app, and to play music even if you’re not connected to the Internet. That’s why today we’re introducing YouTube Music Key beta, a monthly subscription service starting with the promotional price of $7.99/month (discounted from $9.99/month) that will give you all that—ads-free music, background play and offline viewing. It will also include a subscription to Google Play Music, with 30+ million songs, expert-curated playlists, and in the coming days, the ability to watch many YouTube official music videos right from the app.
Thanks to your music videos, remixes, covers, and more, you’ve made YouTube the biggest music service on the planet. To turn YouTube into your perfect music service, we’re launching YouTube Music Key as a beta with our biggest music fans first, and then we’ll bring YouTube Music Key to the whole world together. So, if you see an invite in your app or email, try it out for six months for free.
So basically it’s everything that Spotify, Google Play Music, Rdio and Beats do, but with a video component. I’m not quite clear on which features will be free and which will cost money, but I’m sure it will become apparent shortly.
Importantly, YouTube Music Key takes advantage of an already massive YouTube userbase — unlike with Spotify, there doesn’t need to be any “convincing” of people to try out a new concept for music listening: people already do it. Now it’ll just be easier and more centralized, albeit for a fee.
Watch a video trailer for YouTube Music Key below. It’ll be fun to test this product out in the coming days.
