YouTube Launches Music Subscription Service, YouTube Music Key
YouTube has announced its long-gestating paid subscription service, YouTube Music Key, as Billboard reports. YouTube Music Key will allow ad-free and offline streaming for $9.99 a month (though the initial promotional price is $7.99 a month), which includes music videos and video-free songs. It will launch in invite-only beta form on November 17, and will be bundled with Google Play, the streaming service run by parent company Google.
Non-subscribers, however, will also notice some changes in their YouTube listening experience. Under the “Music” tab on the YouTube homepage, users will be better able to organize and rifle through songs and videos. There will also be an option that allows for continuous listening, similar to Pandora, based off a choice of song or artist.
If that seems like a cosmetic change, the main difference is that YouTube has signed licensing deals with the three major labels—and, as of yesterday, the independent labels with whom they’d clashed over proposed royalty rates. That means unofficial streams posted by regular users are more likely to disappear, replaced by official uploads from those labels (who will then receive a portion of ad revenue from the resulting views). As YouTube puts it on their blog, “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.”
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