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YouTube Unveils New Streaming Service 'YouTube Music,' Rebrands YouTube Red (gizmodo.com) 107

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.
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YouTube Unveils New Streaming Service 'YouTube Music,' Rebrands YouTube Red

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  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:04AM (#56626198)
    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).
  • Just a rebranding and price increase of existing products. Nothing to see here.

  • Weird Timing (Score:4, Informative)

    by supremebob ( 574732 ) <themejunky@geoc i t i e s.com> on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:10AM (#56626230) Journal

    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.

  • by Dorianny ( 1847922 ) on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:17AM (#56626254) Journal
    Guess someone at Google finally realized "YouTube Red " can be very easily confused for a adult entertainment service
  • Phase 1: Create a monopoly on non-porn video by getting everyone to join their platform by promoting freedom of expression and free hosting.
    Phase 2: ?
    Phase 3: Profit

    No matter what Phase 2 turns out to be, it won't allow Phase 1 to continue as such, IMHO.

  • YouTube Red? RedTube? What's the difference?

    (Maybe RedTube isn't a thing anymore, but I won't verify its existence from work, and you shouldn't either.)

    • As of last night, RedTube is still going strong...

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

      • Netflix is Red, but they don't actually mention the word red anywhere in their branding.

        • Rtings.com is red, and they don't mention it anywhere.
          They do indirectly address how certain content can damage your expensive OLED display. Content like their own logo.

    • That's when I turn off WiFi on my cell phone for the purposes of science.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Anonymous Coward

    AKA not workinh anywhere other than the USA? Bigly world internet company.

  • by H3lldr0p ( 40304 ) on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:24AM (#56626304) Homepage

    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.

    • by junk ( 33527 )

      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.

    • 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.

      Why not pay for the content to remove the ads (you can still keep your ad blocker)? That's how the videos are funded.

      • 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.

        Why not pay for the content to remove the ads (you can still keep your ad blocker)? That's how the videos are funded.

        Because with an ad blocker, he doesn't have to.

  • by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:25AM (#56626314)
    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.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Until youtube basically declared war on mobile browsing of their platform. The only way you can now turn the screen off on your phone and listen to a video is to select "request desktop site" and that just makes the webpage incredibly annoying to use. But no amount of annoyance will ever make me pay for something that was literally free a few years ago.

  • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:42AM (#56626404)

    $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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by CastrTroy ( 595695 )

      If you're using Adobe Creative Suite then you are most likely making some money off of it. You can pay as little as $10 a month if you just want photoshop and lightroom (photography pack) which isn't a lot of money at all. The all apps package is $53 a month, but personally I don't see that as that bad for a professional level tool. That will easily pay for itself in time saved trying to use other tools that don't have the features you need. If you aren't generating income from your work, then open sourc

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )

          But you did not own the software before either, you owned a license that granted you the right to use it, but if you did not need it any more you could not re sell it to someone else. But tes, your right to use it did not expire as soon as you stopped paying

    • I enjoyed Cobra Kai, I binge watched it twice, once with my son and once with my daughter. I don't mind making a payment, the actors have to eat. But then what would I watch ? There's no other content on the channel that would make me want to stay a customer, it's certainly no netflix in any other way than the pricing.
    • Because I refuse to pay the monthly fee [for Adobe Creative Cloud], I have switched to open source variants, which are Good enough.

      What's an "open source variant" of Adobe Animate that is worth using? Is, say, Synfig Studio good enough to replace it? Someone making a music video for a song to be posted on YouTube might be interested.

    • Its a bad price if you listen to music less than the average subscriber, or listen to cheaper music. Half the subscribers are subsidizing the other half.

      Or do unlimited subscriptions cause some weird economics and it ends up cheaper for a large majority of subscribers?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    it will use to try to create customized listening experiences.

    Google's algorithms are pathetic. Listened to a couple of songs by a particular artist and now I can't them out of my feed. I'm constantly saying that I'm not interested but they keep showing up.

    It's listen a few times and the feedback mechanism doesn't work.

    AND THEN there are the idiotic lists of "mixes" that I have absolutely no interest in and there's no way to flag it as such.

    And I watched a couple videos of Jordan Stevens and Bill Mahr and my feed has been forever filled with shit things like "Jordan

  • Haven't read anything about a family option. I've been loving the $15/month family plan for Google Play Music All Access - the wife, kiddo, and I all have our own playlists and access to ad-free YouTube. I will not be a happy camper if I have to give that up.
  • Uncertainty (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:50AM (#56626440)
    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: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 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 o

  • by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:53AM (#56626456) Homepage Journal

    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. [minds.com]

    FUCK YOU AND YOUR STREAMING

    • by c ( 8461 )

      I tried it. Having your music in the cloud is really slick, when it works. I live in the country, though, so it usually doesn't. Eventually I got tired of that bug where it would drain the phone battery while trying to download a playlist. Wiped my music from the service and manually load things myself.

      I still have it installed, but I've completely disabled network access (mobile or wifi). I'd remove it entirely but it seems to be the only music player that works sanely with Android Auto.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • You've basically done what I've done. I've got about 20 GB's of OGG/Vorbis files from my own CDs, and yes I put audio books on there as well.

        Pressing play isn't hard. Finding the right album, song, artist, whatever while driving on a Houston freeway is. Unfortunately public transit isn't a reasonable option where I live. If you work downtown it's fine, if you work in another area plan on six to eight hours a day on a bus.

    • If you want streaming of your own audio files (in your preferred format) I would suggest Plex (https://www.plex.tv/). I've recently decided to move as far away from Google as I can (iOS is probably just as bad in tracking) so I bought a personal cloud device and installed the Plex server on it. I then ripped all my DVDs and CDs onto the device and now I basically have Google Play Movies/Music/Photos.

      I did have to buy the subscription ($120 for a lifetime license) but considering I'll be getting rid of Go
      • by Anonymous Coward

        and if Plex isn't your thing, Ampache works really well.

      • I've been using Kodi since it was XBMC. I don't really want Internet streaming - that was the whole point of my post. In the household other devices can stream from the Kodi server over the LAN, (movies, music, photos, TV shows, and from the same device but not in that software ebooks) but I don't really want Internet streaming. If I'm out somewhere with WiFi and a low storage device and I want to keep my kid entertained my Ultraviolet/Movies Anywhere accounts take care of that. Sort of - I found that p

    • I just tested - Google pulled their head out of their ass on this one. I asked Google to play Everybody Knows - momentarily I heard Concrete Blonde singing it.

      Still - don't be Google.

  • Isn't it YouTube Red that's becoming YouTube Premium?
  • Seems Google Music is the older ugly brother that didn't accomplish much in its maturity and has been forgotten. I don't know why they can't just make Google Music seamlessly play youtube videos on queue and then go to the next song, instead of opening links. Probably because google is well past its "cool rule breaking" stage and youtube is a different division from Google Music.
  • Why isn't there a third choice to stop the excessive and constant nagging you to try out YouTube Red ?

    ( ) Yes, I'd like a free trial,
    ( ) No, not now,
    (x) Stop fucking nagging me AND remember that I said NO before

    Will this finally stop it?

  • 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 mess
  • 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
  • So #1, Google Play Music is different from the Music section of Google Play, right? Meaning that I'll still have access to music I've purchased through the Google Play store? (I always download the music as soon as I've purchased so it wouldn't be a disaster for me if it suddenly disappeared from the store, but other people might not be as prepared.)

    #2, will YouTube Music include a podcast section the way Google Play Music currently does? It's certainly not the only way to get podcasts, but it's the easie
    • For Android I use BeyondPod (paid ad-free version) where I can setup a random smart list. So every podcast I have subscribed to it will download and keep at least one episode. Then when I finish one episode then it'll pick a random one to play next. I've been using it for about 6 years. When I've tried something else it seemed lacking.

  • with even 50% accuracy. Their recommendations on YouTube for music are sometimes makes excellent, but oftenthe recommendations just leave me scratching my head. Are they that bad or are they pushing certain music on me just because they are getting paid to do so - like the way the prioritize search results? If that's what they are doing than I can't see ever paying for their "service". For free it's occasionally worth it as I find some gems from time to time (which I then buy), but Google isn't better t
  • Yes finnaly avalable in norway later this year, good bye youtube ads you will not be missed

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