YOUTUBE RED IS DEAD
We get two new subscription services in its place instead
YOUTUBE RED is being reborn as YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. YouTube Music is available for free if you can stomach the adverts, or for $9.99 a month if you can’t. If you have a Google Play Music account, it’ll get a YouTube Music subscription added on. It gets a “re-imagined” app and desktop player, along with some Google AI trickery to search for music and recommend similar material, based on history, habits, and even location (which could be interesting). Unlike Google Play, it offers a lot more than just the official versions of tracks; you get all variations, too—covers, parodies, live versions, acoustic versions, and the rest. How long two such similar services will run side by side is a good question.
YouTube Premium gets you all the goodies from YouTube Music, plus an ad-free library of videos featuring original content. These are being expanded with “bigger original series and movies.” It’ll have to be a very considerable expansion if it ever wants to seriously challenge Netflix or Amazon. YouTube Premium will set you back $11.99 a month—two bucks more than the outgoing YouTube Red, although if you already subscribe to YouTube Red, your bill won’t change, which is a welcome sweetener.
The streaming music business is huge, and YouTube has captured a hearty slice— good for YouTube’s advertising model, but not particularly popular with the music labels. Subscription streaming services do have some enviable numbers: over 70 million on Spotify, and similar numbers on Apple Music. These must be a tempting target. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 85 percent of people using YouTube go there for free music. Once something has been established as free, it can be tricky to get people to pay for it. YouTube has been built around the advertising model, and for now, that will remain the case—until that stream starts running dry, at least. YouTube Red accounted for a tiny fraction of YouTube’s revenue; this new configuration is unlikely to change that for now.
–CL