Search icon

Music

20th May 2018

Google to overhaul YouTube’s music content in bid to take Spotify’s streaming crown

Dave Hanratty

YouTube Music

“Whether you want to listen, watch or discover, it’s all here.”

Google is making a fresh stab at the music streaming game with a revamp of its YouTube Music service, in a bid to take on Spotify and Apple.

Though its dedicated Google Play service can count around 10 million subscribers, that still pales in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music.

Earlier this month, Spotify released its first earnings report as a public company, revealing 75 million paid subscribers. As of April, Apple Music had over 40 million people signed up.

Google Play has also made headlines for the wrong reasons, such as the time it accidentally put Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool album online two hours before official release.

YouTube Music, meanwhile, has to this point skewed more towards video, as you might expect.

Time for a change, then, with the news that YouTube is now hiring music experts from across the globe to freshen up its approach and content.

Clip via TechLinked

This spells an end of sorts YouTube Red; a paid streaming subscription model that housed exclusive, advertisement-free original content which will now be rebranded as YouTube Premium.

Audio streaming and curator-led playlists will now take shape on YouTube Music, with a new app set to roll out on Tuesday 22 May in the United States, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.

Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are expected to follow “soon.”

The company announced its intention to streamline its music options by also introducing a new purpose-built desktop option and a “reimagined” mobile app.

It’s all designed to “make the world of music easier to explore and more personalised than ever,” according to Product Manager for YouTube Music Elias Roman.

“Whether you want to listen, watch or discover, it’s all here,” he says.

“Official songs, albums, thousands of playlists and artist radio plus YouTube’s tremendous catalog of remixes, live performances, covers and music videos that you can’t find anywhere else – all simply organised and personalised. For the first time, all the ways music moves you can be found in one place.”

Topics:

Business