Google announces YouTube Music and YouTube Premium

Google is breaking up its premium YouTube Red service into two new offerings: a YouTube Music streaming service, available either for free with ads or for $9.99 per month, and a YouTube Premium for original video content, costing $11.99 per month.

YouTube Music is Google’s most direct competitor to Spotify yet, coming with “a reimagined mobile app” and a new desktop player, both of them designed specifically for music. The YouTube advantage, argues Google, is that it will combine all the official versions of songs with access to “thousands” of related playlists, remixes, covers, live versions, and of course, music videos. Google’s AI mastery is also being integrated into YouTube Music, with the promise that the app will discover songs either by lyrics or just a general description like “that hipster song with the whistling.”

Music discovery is literally front and center in the new YouTube Music, with the app’s home screen dynamically recommending new listening based on your history, location, and activity. Air travellers might get Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, for example, while gym rats would get something a little more dynamic to keep their pump going. Google is emphasizing its diversity of playlists, too, which will also be used to suggest and surface new music for the user.

In terms of pricing, YouTube Music will be a direct match to all the major music-streaming platforms already available, costing $9.99 for the premium version, which adds background listening, downloads, and an ad-free experience to the free option. Anyone who already has a Google Play Music subscription gets YouTube Music as part of that membership. Play Music isn’t going away yet, though it’s hard to see what future purpose there will be to Google sustaining two services and apps that overlap to quite such a degree.

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