YouTube Music is Here as Google’s New Music Service

Google just announced YouTube Music in the middle of the night. The timing is weird, but this is indeed Google’s new streaming music service that will be at the forefront of their music push.

What the hell is YouTube Music, you ask? It’s basically all of the music you find on YouTube, with videos and everything, better put together than the current YouTube Music. That’s right, Google already has a YouTube Music app, but it sucks and no one uses it. They now plan to push it, though, with a reimagined experience and a paid tier to hopefully make this your music service of choice.

With YouTube Music, you have free and paid tiers. The free tier gives you as much as you can listen to with ads. If you don’t want ads, plus also want extra features, you’ve got YouTube Music Premium to subscribe to. It costs $9.99 and includes background listening, downloads, and no ads. It has both mobile app and desktop experiences, playlists, artist radio, music videos, remixes, covers, and everything else you could ask for in a music service. Oh, and if you already subscribe to Google Play Music, you get a YouTube Music Premium subscription. Sweet.

On that note, Google says that Google Play Music isn’t going anywhere (yet). As you know, we reported earlier this year that Play Music would go away in favor of YouTube Music (previously called YouTube Remix), but Google clearly isn’t ready to tell everyone that. I say that because they already told us that they would have just one music service in the future, saying that “it’s critical we have one offering that meets the needs of consumers and artists.” But for now, Google Play Music subscriptions are safe and they include access to YouTube Music Premium.

In addition to YouTube Music Premium, Google is re-branding YouTube Red as YouTube Premium. It costs $11.99 for new customers and includes YouTube Music Premium. If you already subscribe to YouTube Red, your price stays the same. More here.

Google will launch YouTube Music on Tuesday (May 22) in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and South Korea. They plan to expand quickly after that to countries like Canada, Germany, France, Russia, Spain, and Sweden.

To sign-up to be notified of the launch, hit up this link.

// YouTube [2]