YouTube Music Key is a new and paid subscription service from YouTube, which will be offering ad-free music streaming. The largest online streaming service on the planet is aiming to capitalize on its enjoyed status through this service while aiming to let everyone else try and catch up.
The service is set to stream high-quality audio and video, all ad-free, and will be launched around next week as an invite-only beta. Beta testers will have six months of unrestricted free access to the service, and once the service has officially launched, users can sign up for it at a promotional price of $7.99.
YouTube Music Key adds in a few more features as well to move away from being just another ad-free streaming service; that is background play and offline viewing for the easily distracted. Apparently YouTube Music Key will come included with a Google Play Music subscription as well, which otherwise goes for $9.99 a month.
Google Play Music is Google’s answer to Spotify for music streaming purposes, and includes over 30 million songs. Users will even be able to play YouTube official music videos straight from the Google Play Music app as well.
So how, where and when exactly will the service be launched has somewhat a rather vague answer to it, with next week – read Monday – as the only known time for now. It is likely that YouTube Music Key will be launched in the United States initially along with some European countries, and while you can head over to the YouTube Music Key webpage to send in your email address to YouTube expressing your interest, there’s no word on who will get invited and how. Possibly heavy music listeners will be targeted, with a high probability being the targeting of existing (maybe new) Google Play Music subscribers.
While YouTube Music Key has totally hogged the spotlight, YouTube has made some changes to its existing free service as well. Music content now gets its own dedicated page and according to YouTube:
In the coming days, you’ll be able to see an artist’s discography on YouTube, and play a full album with both their official music videos and high-quality songs our music partners added to YouTube.
So I just sent in my email address and so can you, but don’t get your hopes up high as it’s clear that YouTube will “send you 1-2 emails to let you know when YouTube Music Key is more widely available.”
You can learn more about the service by pointing your browser to: youtube.com/musickey
(Source: Google)
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