Well, nobody saw this coming. At a time when the legitimacy of music streaming services has come into question, YouTube has decided to join the party. This should be interesting.
YouTube introduced its new subscription streaming service Music Key on Nov. 12. For a starting promotional price of $7.99 a month, you can get ad-free music, background play and offline listening through this new music streaming service. It will also include a subscription to Google Play Music.
"We want to give fans more ways to enjoy music on YouTube, but also give artists more opportunities to connect with fans and earn more revenues," YouTube's Music Partnerships Director Christophe Muller told The New York Times.
Music Key will at first be available by invitation only in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Finland in the coming days, according to The Wall Street Journal. YouTube plans to make the service available to all users by next year.
Now the question remains, will people really pay for YouTube? I mean, the site has been synonymous with the word "free" and has helped continue a culture where people don't feel the need to pay for music since it launched in 2005. You can already find single tracks and full albums from your favorite artists without having to pay for them. Of course, they're of varying degrees of quality and can also be interrupted by ads, but isn't that part of YouTube's charm anyway? Plus, it's a little hard to put a price on content when the foundation of your site is built upon amateur, er, user-generated videos.
Still, as Spotify has shown this week, there are still people out there who will pay for music, even when they can get it from the service for free. Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek wrote a lengthy blog post yesterday, in which he revealed 12.5 million out of the music streaming service's 50 million active users pay $120 a year to subscribe to it. When Music Key officially launches, it's going to have some steep competition from the likes of Spotify and other subscription music streaming services, no doubt.
But even Spotify knows that YouTube is a force to be reckoned with. Ek recognized YouTube as one of the three most popular ways people listen to music today in his blog post, along with radio and piracy. So those that think Spotify's audio focus and YouTube's visual focus aren't comparable are mistaken. And of course, who hasn't put on YouTube videos in the background while they're surfing the web or doing something else on their computers?
Clearly, YouTube is a major player in the music game. Now we will see if it can successfully make it to this next level.
Image: Rego Korosi / Flickr
