YouTube Unveils New Streaming Service 'YouTube Music,' Rebrands YouTube Red (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: YouTube Music, a streaming music platform designed to compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, officially has a launch date: May 22nd. Its existence will also shift around YouTube and Google's overall media strategy, which has thus far been quite the mess. YouTube Music will borrow the Spotify model and offer a free, ad-supported tier as well as a premium version. The paid tier, which will be called YouTube Music Premium, will be available for $9.99 per month. It will debut in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and South Korea before expanding to 14 other countries.

One of the selling points for YouTube Music will be the ability to harness the endless amount of information Google knows about you, which it will use to try to create customized listening experiences. Pitchfork reported that the app, with the help of Google Assistant, will make listening recommendations based on the time of day, location, and listening patterns. It will also apparently offer "an audio experience and a video experience," suggesting perhaps an emphasis on music videos and other visual content. From here, Google seems to be focused on making its streaming strategy a little less wacky. Google Play Music, the company's previous music streaming service that is still inexplicably up and running despite teetering on the brink of extinction for years, will slowly be phased out according to USA Today. Meanwhile, the paid streaming subscription service, known as YouTube Red, is being rebranded to YouTube Premium and will cost $11.99 per month instead of $9.99. (Pitchfork notes that existing YouTube Red subscribers will be able to keep their $9.99 rate.) YouTube Premium will include access to YouTube Music Premium. Here's a handy-dandy chart that helps show what is/isn't included in the two plans.

Comments

Demonetization of content

[sinij]

I am curious how Google is going to handle demonetization of songs due to objectionable to advertisers content (e.g. rap and not-for-radio lyrics).

Re: Demonetization of content

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of YouTube users flag videos so they get demonetized. They do this so their music playlist is uninterrupted.

Weird Timing

[supremebob]

It's odd that Google decided to rebrand YouTube Red now, considering that they just spent a small fortune promoting it recently.

Their new YouTube exclusive shows like Cobra Kai (the amusing Karate Kid reboot with the original actors) are filled with YouTube Red logos.

Red Light District

[Dorianny]

Guess someone at Google finally realized "YouTube Red " can be very easily confused for a adult entertainment service

Re:Red Light District

[omnichad]

I don't know how it got launched with that name. From the very beginning, it didn't make sense.

Google wants me to *stop* paying them?

[H3lldr0p]

Because the only reason I have YT:Red is because of the Play Music sub I have. That's it. I wouldn't pay for it otherwise. There's plenty on YT I watch but I wasn't bothered by ads before because I have my adblockers active. The best I can hope for is that the new service lets me keep my uploaded music and stuff I bought from Play Music otherwise I have one less reason to use Google's universe.

Re:Google wants me to *stop* paying them?

[junk]

This.

I've looked at Youtube Red once or twice but don't see it as valuable. It's not worth $0.01, let alone $2.00. I've been using Google Music since pre-launch and it works great. If it dies, I'll take my pennies elsewhere. My daily listening habits will never include the need for video. I guess I should finally start looking at other streaming services.

Bah Humbug...

[Freischutz]

As long the service formerly known as YouTube Red is only available in the United States, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea I quite frankly don't care since my country is probably not one of the other 14 they countries Google has planned to bless with their new service.

I already have too many montly fees.

[jellomizer]

$12.00 a month isn't a bad price.
But it isn't the only service that I would want to have so all of them added up I am paying hundreds of dollars a month. If I wan't to save some money, then I will need to actively cancel my account. vs Passively just not buy an other copy.

Adobe Creative Suite is the biggest offender. It is a lot per month, where before If I paid a grand for the software, I could keep it years past its supported version until I can justify getting a new version. If money is tight, I can live with the older version. Because I refuse to pay the monthly fee, I have switched to open source variants, which are Good enough.

Uncertainty

[Luthair]

Google and Microsoft seem to be consistently creating and re-creating the same services due to internal politics and killing the earlier versions. Eventually this lack of a consistency starts to not only harm the adoption of the product iteration it spills over into the brand and harms the adoption of future products because the potential users aren't interested in becoming invested as it may be killed in X-months.

Re:Uncertainty

[Anonymous Coward]

Google and Microsoft seem to be consistently creating and re-creating the same services due to internal politics and killing the earlier versions. Eventually this lack of a consistency starts to not only harm the adoption of the product iteration it spills over into the brand and harms the adoption of future products because the potential users aren't interested in becoming invested as it may be killed in X-months.

This is what happens when a company has too much money and too many employees.

As a manger, you can't have your people just sitting around doing nothing. They have to be working. They have to be productive!! They have to be doing things. Big things. Because doing big things is how you get raises and promotions.

And so you have thousands of people doing things and constantly trying to think of new things to do, with no thought given to "does this make sense?"

It's "New Coke" syndrome. Repeated, over and over.

Google's approach to music is why I use Power Amp.

[pecosdave]

In the early days of Android the built in music player sucked. There were some reasonable third party ones, and even some of the carriers and phone manufacturers came through with some reasonable ones, but the built in one sucked.

Then when the early version of the Play Music app (maybe it was called something else) came out it was awesome! It would take the music on my phone and make virtual stations out of them. It would catalog and categorize and make intelligent playlist, I loved it.

Then they introduced their stream service, they whored it out a little, but I ignored that and kept using it as is.

Then it started whoring a little stronger - to the point of making the app harder to use.

THEN it started streaming music over my metered mobile connection, I could manually set it back to local only, but it kept finding ways to stream. Any excuse it could make up it would stream instead of play local, even if the files were local to the device.

I tried to play nice with it. I uploaded all my OGG/Vorbis files to their cloud so it could be in both places. It would convert them to MP3s if I pulled them in on another device. Music I bought straight from the play store started to get truncated file names and double/tripple downloads, especially when using the Google created Linux music sync utility. I even opened tickets, they had me jump through hoops that went nowhere, they just scratched their head. Let me re-emphasize this for you :If I bought it from them it was much more likely to be hosed up than if I did it myself.

Yep, Power Amp it is.

Based on a history of unreliable bandwidth, metered connections, and lots of driving - especially in rural areas with no coverage I never could get on-board with streaming.

So - now that I have Power Amp, used to I could say "Okay Google Play Thunderstruck" and it would open PowerAmp my default player and play Thunderstruck for me. Now it demands I select a streaming service.

FUCK YOU AND YOUR STREAMING

Re:Red? Why not literally any other colour

[omnichad]

Or "red band" movie trailers. Or red light district. There are so many reasons why red is not the color of your paid video service.

Google Music

[Only Time Will Tell]

I've subscribed to Google Music (or Play Music, or whatever its called now). I like using it to listen to music at work as it isn't blocked by the firewall like some other services are, and it is handy to find and listen to new music I'd pass by if I had to buy it first. But, I'm not sure how interested I'll be if this convenience goes away and the price is raised. It seems everytime you find something useful within Google's universe, they decide to ax it for something worse. How many iterations of messenger and music services are we on from them?

Not-another streaming service

[techm]

I've been a DJ for twenty years, both professionally and just for fun. I listen to music all day long. I have never used any sort of streaming service nor will I. I'm a firm believer that it takes more than an algorithm based on what you have listened to to determine what you will listen to. Sometimes, it takes someone else to give you a selection out of left field, something complementary rather than "more of the same", even an opposite. What it takes is a human to curate and present. For that, we've had disc jockeys for decades. Terrestrial radio pretty much died due to the firing of DJs and replacement by auto-dj machines, Tom Petty even wrote a great song about it called "The Last DJ". A DJs job is to play the songs you didn't know you needed to hear. So Spotify? Apple Music? now this Youtube thing? No. I present an alternative: Radio paradise (https://www.radioparadise.com). 100% listener suppored, music 100% selected and presented by a knowledgeable bunch of human beings who know what they are doing. There's others out there also. We lost something when we lost radio. Bring it back :)

Re:Youtube annoying.

[houghi]

All this only works when you are logged in.

I use the following to export all my subscriptions : https://www.youtube.com/subscr... Without the ?action_takeout=1 you can manage your subscriptions.

To me it is the only way to follow all the around 200 channels I follow at this moment.

Took me a while to know how to get there by browsing.
Cllck on the Bell icon and then on the settings. There you can click on "Manage all subscriptions". Scroll to the bottom and you can click on "Export subscriptions". It will be an OPML file. I import that into Liferea and only log in to YouTube to add and remove channels. I also close my browser, so all cookies get nuked.

This is about Google so it could change in the next 30 minutes. They have moved it around a lot already.