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YouTube Music, a new music streaming service, is coming soon

229 points by ac29 8y ago

454934632 8y ago
YouTube Music, leaving shortly after.
dhruvrrp 8y ago
So what is the Youtube Music app that has been on my iPhone for months? And what happens to Google Play Music, google's other music streaming service?
- super_trooper 8y ago
  May the best app win as usual ;)
- fluxsauce 8y ago
  > And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change -- you’ll still be able to access all of your purchased music, uploads and playlists in Google Play Music just like always.
  - rtpg 8y ago
    Great! The one big reason I sticked with GPM is being able to upload tracks that just aren't on streaming services. I kinda like the social aspects of Spotify but I really like having random OSTs/DJ mixes all in the same spot
- kcorbitt 8y ago
  The Google Play Music and YouTube Music teams were merged about a year ago, and have been working on producing a single app that can serve both userbases since then. I assume this announcement means they’ve finished that work. (Source: I was on the team at the time, but I’ve been gone for a while at this point.)
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    I really hope it doesn't screw up my Google Play Music workflow / usage but I was just thinking today why can't I just listen to YouTube songs on the same app. Other weirdness was my GPM app didn't load all morning so I listened off the YouTube Music app as a fallback. Btw! Thank you for all your hard work! I am die hard for Google All Music Access! I was happy when Google grandfathered me on to YouTube Red too. You guys have done great work overall.
TimeOutBoss 8y ago
Something they should have done long back, I had to use other Youtube apps just to listen to music in backgroud
- realusername 8y ago
  I've uninstalled the Youtube app because of this, I understand the business case for it but making the video stop when the app isn't focused is making the Youtube app utterly pointless. The app looks beautiful and obviously they took a lot of effort to build it but this small detail makes it completely unusable unfortunately.
  - balls187 8y ago
    I'm not sure your exact use case, but if you are a Youtube red subscriber, the official IOS app continues to play audio if the app is in the background.
    - realusername 8y ago
      Ah really? I'm on Android and don't have a Youtube account at all. I mean the app should work the same way as desktop, the video does not stop when I switch tabs on my browser... I understand that they are trying to sell Youtube Red this way but there's probably a better way than sabotaging their own app.
      - lathiat 8y ago
        I think the reality of why they do this is to stop people using YouTube as a free music player, which unfortunately is a very common usage. It's a shame this restricts other youtube videos too though, such as creators / original content / etc. I'd really also love to use Picture-in-Picture on iOS.
        Cu3PO42 8y ago
        I can definitely see their reasoning, but like you, I don't like it. There's times where I really just want to listen to something and not need the video without it being music. As for the Picture-in-Picture, there is a somewhat hacky solution. If you go to the video in Safari and install Pipifier (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-every-web-video/id1234771095?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-every-web-v...) you can use it to start Picture-in-Picture. I don't use it that often due to the extra steps involved, but it does work.
fluxsauce 8y ago
I've been a Google Play Music subscriber from the beginning, which means I've enjoyed the grandfathered $7.99 price. That has also extended to YouTube Red. However, this announcement muddies the waters a bit. > If you are a subscriber to Google Play Music, good news, you get a YouTube Music Premium membership as part of your subscription each month. Cool, I guess, except I don't go to YouTube for Music. I really am incredibly interested in YouTube Red. I mean YouTube Premium, I guess. > To extend the features of YouTube Music Premium beyond the music app, we’re soon introducing YouTube Premium, the new name for our YouTube Red subscription service. [describes YouTube Red] If you’re already a YouTube Red (soon to be YouTube Premium) member, don’t worry you’ll still enjoy your current price. So, if you have Google Play Music, do you get YouTube Premium?
- mrbill 8y ago
  nope, you have to pay $12 to continue having Red. :(
  - dannyw 8y ago
    This is extremely disappointing. I’m sure the amount of $7.99 GPM early adopters is minuscule to their metrics, but the cost of goodwill is far higher.
    - bestnameever 8y ago
      > If you’re already a YouTube Red (soon to be YouTube Premium) member I subscribe to google play music but if I look at my youtube red status is says member. So I assume, I will continue to enjoy it at no extra cost. I chatted with google and they said the same but the wording is really confusing...so who knows.
      - amanzi 8y ago
        YouTube Red is the killer feature that keeps me with GPM. If I lose YouTube Red, I'd probably switch back to Spotify.
      - 8y ago
adamnemecek 8y ago
Lol why does google make these also-ran services? Too little too late, I legit dont care. Like what is the differentiator here. Google really doesn't get culture and the internet. The internet lets me listen to weird shit, make it easy to discover underground shit, not fucking Drake and fucking Havana. You know the things played nonstop on the radio. God their product launches legit piss me off. So many resources to make something dope and they produce this watered down diarrhea.
- asah 8y ago
  You appear to be in the minority: YouTube is the #2 highest trafficked website as of April 2018: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_website... The most recent example: 134,000,000 views in 7 days for This is America. Plus millions more reaction videos, remixes and more. Speaking personally, I absolutely create playlists from music videos.
  - adamnemecek 8y ago
    This is related how? Ok why launch a new product? What can I do with this that wasn't possible before?
    - danvayn 8y ago
      .
      - adamnemecek 8y ago
        Lol their recommendation service? Are we using the same product? They are very heavily skewed towards popular things.
        viraptor 8y ago
        It really depends on your library. If I try the feeling lucky radio on Google music now, I can't spot anything in the first 50 tracks or so that was / would be played on the radio. The prepared mood radios are a bit more mainstream, but still not even close to the radio a/b-list
jypepin 8y ago
Normally when I see this kind of announcement, I think "It will take long before they learn and nail it like the main competition" - in this case Spotify. Spotify seems to be doing a great job curating new music or building playlist specifically for me according to what I listen to, and I can only assume it's 100% automated obviously. Google is so strong with ML today, and not stopping, I don't know what will allow smaller competitors to stay differentiated. I just had a call with a G recruiter, and pretty much 100% of the roles they have in all their European offices are ML-related roles, on most products. And they hire without ML experience, which I think is a sign of how much they are investing in ML. This is no news, but having this call and seeing how little non-ML they had was really eye opening on how much this is G's focus now, and it can only be exponential I assume.
- babuskov 8y ago
  > Google is so strong with ML today, and not stopping, I don't know what will allow smaller competitors to stay differentiated. If they use the same algorithm YouTube uses to pick videos for me, Spotify doesn't have to worry at all. It just gives me the same things over and over and I never discovered anything worthy from their video suggestions. I have to actively search to find anything new.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  What you’re saying seems like it must be true... Google must be so strong at ML. How could it be otherwise? And yet, YouTube recommendations are terrible lowest common denominator nonsense. It’s just “more of the same” for some surface level definition of “same”. There doesn’t seem to be any playfulness to the learning algorithm at all. No Bayesian experiments. There’s no flex. Amazon too... so much data, so many smart people. Why can’t these companies lead me on a garden path of delights? Why can’t they take my hand and walk with me through the full content space? Why do I continually feel that there are vast delightful segments of the catalog I will never see unless I query for them?
  - Benjamin_Dobell 8y ago
    Not just YouTube, Google Play Music's recommendations are truly terrible. I'm regularly being recommended whatever is popular, rather than anything I'll actually listen to. The only time I've ever witnessed Google Play get a recommendation right is when a band I've already added to my library releases a new album. It irks me that after being a subscriber for many years, Google Play still doesn't have anything like Spotify's Discover Weekly. The Google Play Music recommendations are just so god-damn awful. I don't know if it's actually the case, but they come across as ads, not recommendations i.e. Some record label paid lots of money to be "recommended" frequently.
fphhotchips 8y ago
Loyal YouTube Red subscriber here. I don't care about music. I have Spotify for that. All I want is for them to unbreak Chromecast in the new desktop interface.
birdman3131 8y ago
What sells me on spotify is the ability to control it from any device. Listening on my phone while at my computer? Hit skip on my keyboard and the phone skips to the next track. Playing on my Dot? I can pause right from my phone. Ditto with volume control. I wanted to like amazon music but I could not because of the lack of these features.
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  Did you set this up manually? I'm not using Spotify but this sounds rather confusing. Is it at least smart enough to recognize when there's something else playing on your computer and send the skip command to that app instead of your phone if you hit the skip key?
  - weavie 8y ago
    It knows which device is currently playing. Anything you do sends it to the currently playing device. You can pull up a list of all connected devices and select which one you want to be playing. It then starts on the new device from where the old one left off. It works really well. I have my raspberry pi plugged into my amplifier, and play through that. I control it with my phone or laptop, whichever is nearer.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      I think the question is about the media keys. What happens if your phone is playing something on Spotify, and your laptop is playing something on VLC, but also has Spotify open? Does pressing the skip media key make both players skip, or just one of them?
      - weavie 8y ago
        Ah interesting question. This thread implies that there can be a war between apps fighting for control https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Media-keys-no-longer-work/td-p/807591. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Media-keys-.... I've never really used the media keys, so have no idea how it really works in practice. Might have a play when I get home later.
marky_nolan 8y ago
Google trying to get into everything it can.
- Saad4u 8y ago
  This is business, my friend. :)
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
Cool, now we pay for poorly ripped 128kbps streaming music?
- Applejinx 8y ago
  In my experience, 124kbps.
chrisper 8y ago
Let me guess. It's going to be US only again as always even though I pay for it... (like my GPM subscription price is not cheaper because parts of it are not available)
- balls187 8y ago
  It's in the article. Starting Tuesday, we're rolling out the new YouTube Music experience in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Korea*. It will expand more broadly in the coming weeks. We’ll also soon be launching in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
  - chrisper 8y ago
    Not sure how I missed that. Thanks!
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    As usual, just a few privileged European countries. Looking forward for an EU wide law to force lazy US companies to either offer the service to everyone or not at all.
    - briandear 8y ago
      What is your “unprivileged” country? And just FYI, Apple Music is available there.
      - darklajid 8y ago
        Not the GP: Singapore here..
      - tobyhinloopen 8y ago
        The Netherlands
      - pjmlp 8y ago
MichaelGG 8y ago
If it'll let me play YouTube audio on my Sonos it'd be a great feature. Otherwise I'm not quite getting the value. Workaround for this is to buy an HDMI splitter and send the audio to a sound system then use Chromecast, but Sonos is just so convenient.
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cma 8y ago
Why can't I cast a Youtube video's audio to chromecast audio? The only way is to share the whole screen which burns battery and causes skipping if your wifi isn't perfect.
- izacus 8y ago
  Because copyright holders don't allow you to. They want you to pay for music and not listen to it for free on YouTube. This is why any kind of videoless playback is disabled without Red subscription.
  - mkj 8y ago
    Chromecast audio for youtube doesn't work even if you pay for google music (includes youtube red). My theory is that it's too hard to get video/audio sync like that, so they don't allow it. Same for sending youtube audio to Sonos. Copyright holders still might be the reason though.
    - izacus 8y ago
      Yeah, YouTube Music does work though. Inability to listen to talks et al. via only audio is really annoying me too though.
- hndamien 8y ago
  I think you need premium.
- hoppelhase 8y ago
  Maybe there's more to it. The YT API also does not allow to present Video Streams (Audio/Video) separately.
ikeboy 8y ago
>If you are a subscriber to Google Play Music, good news, you get a YouTube Music Premium membership as part of your subscription each month. Calling it now, within 5 years there are at least 5 different Google services for streaming music (up from 3 now, Play Music/Youtube/Youtube Music) at least 2 of which are also somehow messaging apps. It's even plausible, one for VR music videos, one for streaming in your self driving google car?
- viraptor 8y ago
  YouTube already includes comments and a chat on live streams, so close to a messaging app ;-) Seriously though, YouTube is not a music service, or at least it looks like they don't want it to be, since the interface isn't really great for that case. It also kills phone battery if you use it that way, so YouTube music is an experience upgrade.
  - ikeboy 8y ago
    I mean the top videos are pretty much all music videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_vi...
  - csydas 8y ago
    > so YouTube music is an experience upgrade. Based on the press release, it doesn't seem so. It's basically just added a "music only" option, but otherwise it seems to just be a curated section of Youtube that only involves musical content. The same experience you get with vanilla Youtube seems to be applicable. And looking at the pricing, you still get all the battery pitfalls baked into Youtube unless you buy premium. Honestly, it feels more like an attempt to curate Youtube rather than developing a music app. Right now the top video content competes with the published Music content and likely just creates a really weird imbalance in the algorithm toppers. Personally, I think they could have just handled this with some better organization within Youtube, but here we are with a new app.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    Actually, YouTube also has a second chat app included.
code_duck 8y ago
I’ve been using the YouTube Music app for several months now. I find it convenient in some ways, but overall less polished and less useful than the main YouTube app - a conclusion I only came to recently and after the most recent, somewhat buggy update, which often displays the incorrect song playing on my iPhone lock screen, and incorporates slidey actions that interfere with iOS menus. I like that it has a playlist where you can easily see and skip back to history. The main thing that has me using the standard app now is that Music has only a subset of videos available. I’ve been listening to a lot of obscure music lately, and I’ve started to come up with situations where 65% of the videos are available in the Music app and 100% in the YouTube app. I would love to use a YouTube app for music, but it can’t be a second tier service to the main one.
mrweasel 8y ago
I don't really care about the music part, but it's great to see that Youtube Red/Premium will be available in more countries. It never made sense that you couldn't buy YouTube Red outside a few countries. YouTube doesn't have enough advertisers in some market (e.g. in Denmark), so you end up skipping the same five ads constantly. So financially is seemed that Red should have been made available in countries with few advertisers first, rather than showing me ads for YouTube itself.
viraptor 8y ago
I hope that will allow the streaming accounts like lo-fi and synth radios to live stream music itself without the looped image. I really like the ChilledCow, but always felt it's wasted bandwidth to get the video stream with them.
tokyodude 8y ago
YouTube is the only service I've used that gets WORSE if you pay. Without paying I can watch one video on my TV while browsing other videos on my laptop to queue up. With paying as soon as look up a video on my laptop I get an error on the tv "only one device allowed"
- dexen 8y ago
  They are following in the footsteps of the movie industry, which also provides worse experience to the paying customer. Pay for movie theater ticket, get served 30+ minutes of ads. (edit) Pay for DVD, get unskippable "antipiracy ads". Torrent the movie, and you'll be watching the movie in under 3 minutes of download.
  - Moter8 8y ago
    Almost instantly nowadays, because there are streaming torrent programs.
  - Already__Taken 8y ago
    They keep trying to make it more like TV. Seemingly oblivious to the generation using it exclusively because it's not TV.
    - mcintyre1994 8y ago
      I guess giant TV advertising budgets are sticky and they're trying to figure out how to shift them to YouTube?
  - pferdone 8y ago
    I wouldn't call an IMAX setup a 'subpar experience'
    - Maro 8y ago
      These days, when I have a movie ticket for time T, I plan to arrive at T+20 minutes. That's when the ads are over, roughly when the trailers are playing.
ksec 8y ago
I reread this multiple times, and not getting it. ( As with pretty much all things google does, apart from its search engine ) So does it stop me from just watching Music Video for free on Youtube? If not, then why would I subscribe? Surely I must be missing something here.
- chii 8y ago
  you can't play youtube videos _and_ run another app at the same time (background play) without paying.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    ... or using the strangely named "newpipe"
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Or using Firefox for Android with the Video Background Play Fix addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
      - ThatPlayer 8y ago
        None of those offer a nice feature I have in the current YouTube Red app: an offline mixtape, which is actually dynamically generated once a day or so. I like it because I can find a song, and listen to it multiple times on my computer, and it'll be the app will automatically download it afterwards.
lostmsu 8y ago
I like how YouTube Music is like Skype for Business or any other mostly unrelated product being dragged by a brand.
vesak 8y ago
Did someone decipher what happens to albums bought in Google Music? It seems all the time a better and better idea that I went to Apple Music.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  This statement seems pretty clear to me: > And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change
unixhero 8y ago
I already have it. The app is called YouTube Vanced. It's brilliant.
heavymark 8y ago
Their music apps were already confusing and now more so. On iOS you had YouTube for videos and YT Music for Music (that also shows videos) for 10 a month. So now you can also pay 10 a month to get YT Red but without any videos? Why not just have an option in settings to hide videos in YT Music. Since then you could watch them when battery life. I personally love YT Music/Red or whatever they are calling it but the branding of the services seems all over the map.
em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
How long until it's discontinued? Oh, and btw, with tools like NewPipe, I can listen without ads.
- wlkr 8y ago
  I only discovered NewPipe recently and it's a really great app. For those unaware NewPipe is an alternate YouTube app on F-Droid which has loads of nifty features such as being able to play the audio of videos in the background so you can shut off the screen. It will even handle subscriptions for you without any sign in. https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/
- izacus 8y ago
  > Oh, and btw, with tools like NewPipe, I can listen without ads. Just remember that for copyright holders of those songs you're effectively doing the same thing as just torrenting the mp3. ;)
- JeremyBanks 8y ago
  Probably never, if you think about it instead of falling back to a meme. With tool like guns, I can get my my groceries without paying money. But that’s not very relevant to the general grocery experience.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  NewPipe is brilliant! I don't even care so much about the ads(still HATE ads), but the interface is superior in almost every way. The YouTube app, as with all of Google's clunky Android apps, takes several seconds to load, is slow, cluttered, and annoys me with notifications for "trending" videos. It's the second worst Google app to Maps, which is embarrassingly slow and gets worse with every update. NewPipe, on the other hand, has a low memory footprint, boots up immediately, has a clean interface, doesn't remove features, lets me queue up videos in the background, lets me choose audio-only, etc. The only thing it's missing is Chromecast, but then again I haven't updated NewPipe in a while, and Chromecast kinda blows anyway. I'd say Google should just discontinue the YouTube app and use the NewPipe codebase, but I won't say that because I know they'd destroy it. NewPipe literally blows people's minds when I show it to them. They can't grasp how there can be another app for YouTube that's better. Sadly, these people are too afraid to use F-Droid, even though the Play Store has its share of malicious software.
sidyapa 8y ago
Just a suggestion, why not just allow background playback instead of spending your millions on another streaming app which would be ideally better than competition in single digit %s?
- JeremyBanks 8y ago
  Background playback has been available with YouTube Red/Premium for years.
dvcrn 8y ago
I wonder what happens to self-uploaded music. I read that it's being migrated, but will we still be able to upload, or will this disappear? The only reason why I'm not with Spotify, but with Google Music (or now Apple music as test) is because I have a lot of songs that are just not covered in their catalogues that I uploaded myself.
- reificator 8y ago
  Yep. Good old Tool, who won't let any streaming service use their music because it devalues the experience of listening to a full album. Except that it's been available on Pandora for years, which is the only major streaming service that doesn't allow you to listen to full albums.
- karpodiem 8y ago
  This is the $1000 question. Google Play Music will live in the short term, but this comment from Google indicates that Google Play Music will eventually be retired - “it’s critical we have one offering that meets the needs of consumers and artists.” Source - https://www.droid-life.com/2018/05/16/youtube-music-price-launch-date/ https://www.droid-life.com/2018/05/16/youtube-music-price-la... Will YouTube Music launch with feature parity w/Google Play Music and offer an upload function so that users can stream tracks they upload themselves?
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  The post explicitly says: > And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change -- you’ll still be able to access all of your purchased music, uploads and playlists in Google Play Music just like always.
  - dvcrn 8y ago
    Yes, uploaded music will be available but this doesn't cover if we will still be able to upload new music going forward.
INTPenis 8y ago
This seems redundant but I do know a lot of people who find it easier to turn on music via youtube than any other service, for some reason. Personally I think this should have been a move for more user generated content categories within Google Play Music instead of altering the Youtube concept. Because anything other than user generated content and you have to assume that Alphabet already has permission to play it in one service, then why not get permission to play it in their actual music service.
swebs 8y ago
I'm worried about using a service like this after Youtube started censoring videos that don't match their political ideology. Will YouTube Music be censoring songs that have references to guns? Are they going to randomly demonetize songs that use bad language? Why not just use Spotify then?
- theNJR 8y ago
  Who is also censoring based on their ideology...
  - darkstar999 8y ago
    Spotify. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-05-10/spotify-announces-new-hate-content-and-hateful-conduct-public-policy/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-05-10/spotify-announces-ne... Although they aren't removing music or changing it, they just don't put it in their curated or autogenerated playlists.
- anchpop 8y ago
  The competition is fierce enough in this field that that's not really an option for them
  - Mindwipe 8y ago
    Google Play Music never really made playing uncensored music work, and that never bothered them. If you uploaded tracks you'd frequently get the radio edit played back.
sandrobfc 8y ago
Everything I needed from YouTube for it to become a "music streaming service" was the possibility to leave the app without it closing the damn video. Other than that, if they can keep all the live concerts they have now in audio only, it could be cool, but I would hardly change from my current service.
Cub3 8y ago
Have they figured out family plans with "Google Apps" accounts yet? I just want a Google family plan with a custom domain for my email, still can't figure out how to do this. Also when I click: > try “that hipster song with the whistling” The uploader has not made this video available in your country.
- luma 8y ago
  I don't know that this is ever going to change. I'm stuck in the same situation - as a paying GSuite user you aren't able to use several Google features for reasons I'm not exactly clear on.
rando444 8y ago
The best part about music on youtube is all of the songs uploaded by people who don't have the rights... and for some reason don't get them taken down, despite often monetizing them. Will be interesting to see how this fits into their new model.
- userbinator 8y ago
  The rights owners get a cut of the monetisation too, so it gives a reason to leave them there.
userbinator 8y ago
Coincidentally, I've already been using YouTube as a "music streaming service" for many years --- youtube-dl, mpv, and some Perl scripts holding it all together.
- n4r9 8y ago
  Interesting! Do you have a way to search for particular tracks and load them into a queue via the command line? That would be awesome.
- Sylos 8y ago
  For a more integrated experience, there's also: https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
bsharitt 8y ago
>If you are a subscriber to Google Play Music, good news, you get a YouTube Music Premium membership as part of your subscription each month. And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change Right now I get YouTube Red with my Google Play Music subscription, so it sounds like I'm losing that, that's actually a very big change. Instead of a nice little add on, I now get a subscription to a completely redundant service instead.
- ebiester 8y ago
  I may be naive, but I don’t think they meant to say the two were unbundled. They’re changing the name of YouTube Red to YouTube premium but it seems like they’re keeping the two bundled.
  - bsharitt 8y ago
    They specifically mention that Google Play Music subscribers will be getting access to YouTube Music, so I would take that to mean not YouTube Premium(i.e. renamed Red).
vthallam 8y ago
Man this is so confusing! I had to read the blog post twice to understand what service should one have to get Play Music, Youtube Red and new Youtube Music subscription. > YouTube Premium will continue to provide an ad-free experience, background play, and downloads across the millions of videos on YouTube. But because it includes our brand new YouTube Music service, the price will be $11.99 for all new members TLDR : You pay $11.99 to get all premium youtube and Play music offers.
dandare 8y ago
All I need is the ability to listen to the audio of YT videos with my phone screen off.
- gschier 8y ago
  YouTub Red gives you that... If it's available in your country..
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  YouTube Red (now YouTube Premium) allows this.
- dTal 8y ago
  NewPipe has a "background mode". There's a short hiccup when you switch to "background mode" but you can still control it from there so it's not so bad. I find it shocking that Google is permitted to charge money for a feature like that, when as far as I can tell most of the music on Youtube was uploaded without permission of the copyright owner.
  - Sylos 8y ago
    I mean, they're not, according to their own ToS (or even their own interpretation of it). It says something in there along the lines of video and audio may not be separated. On the basis of which, they ran a witch hunt on all 3rd party YouTube apps on the Play Store, which had a background playback feature. This in itself makes no sense, as separating video and audio during playback had always been possible on the desktop by simply switching to a different tab in your browser or minimizing the window. But obviously, this wasn't about showing integrity. They published YouTube Red with its background playback feature just a few months after this witchhunt. And since the Play Store is their property, they didn't even need a legitimate basis for throwing these apps out. They own the market, so they were able to just shut out the competition. Don't build your life on Google property...
wnevets 8y ago
Why? Google music largely works well.
- darkstar999 8y ago
  > [...]YouTube’s tremendous catalog of remixes, live performances, covers and music videos that you can’t find anywhere else
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dbtqgoat 8y ago
How is this different than the YouTube Music that I already have installed on my phone
KasianFranks 8y ago
It won't be any good without 2 things: 1. A good music recommendation system 2. Crypto
ibdf 8y ago
Do they really need to rebrand every time they fix a bug or offer some improvements? Yes, I'm exaggerating, but how do you expect to create a market of loyal users for something we don't know will last more than year?
- hb3b 8y ago
  It's insane, right? You would think with their talent pool and billion dollar-sized budgets they wouldn't struggle with basic brand marketing. The insulting part of this change is that they are raising prices and further fragmenting an already half-baked service. Google needs to take advice from someone like John Legere and start building cohesive products. https://www.geekwire.com/2016/listen-shut-f-tell-t-mobiles-john-legere-shares-leadership-advice/ https://www.geekwire.com/2016/listen-shut-f-tell-t-mobiles-j...
macspoofing 8y ago
The way Google brands products reminds me of Microsoft when they tried to attach an unrelated product to a moderately popular consumer brand (Looking at you Groove Music, I mean Xbox Music, I mean Zune Music) There is nothing wrong with Google Play Music apart from the 'Play' misnomer. Google Music should be a standalone product that competes with Spotify. It's a well defined and well understood category. YouTube is a different product, used by different people, for different purposes and in different ways. Now you're confusing everything. Can I get audio-only version of YouTube videos or just YouTube music videos or does it have to be an audio-only upload? Does that mean you can have audio-only YouTube videos now (even without putting in some reference image?)? Is it going to kill my bandwidth if I try to stream on LTE? Is it going to replace Google Music? Are my playlists in Google Music and YouTube going to be replaced? Will there be YouTube comments on music (I hope not)? Can anybody upload to YouTube music? A year ago Google added mediocre support for podcasts to Google Music instead of building a dedicated app - will YouTube Music handle podcasts? URGH! All they needed to do was to add background playback to YouTube and maybe a little link to the YouTube video in Google Music, and if you're watching a music video on YouTube, a link to a streaming service of your choice (like Google Music, Spotify or Apple Music). Given how poorly this has been thought through, you just know in 2 years there will be another rebrand.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  In principle at least, it might be nice to have live performances and music videos too.
- brianpgordon 8y ago
  Just so you're aware, you already get background playback on mobile devices if you pay for YouTube Red.
  - mapgrep 8y ago
    I find this the height of arrogance that Google charges for this and it enrages me on a level I freely admit is irrational and pointless. But just the gall: 1. Get FREE creative work from musicians, film types, tv types, and tons of bright friendly ordinary people 2. Monetize the hell out of it (fine) 3. Allow a sewer community of racists bullies and other terrible people to develop in comments section (negligent but ok it's gotten a little better) 4. Make it hard for visitors to extract original media even though you're purporting to be a hosting service (lame but I can live with it) 5. Cripple playback in basic ways for petty reasons (you're starting to really suck) 6. Try and CHARGE people to undo 5 (Gah!!!!! Die!!!) I pay for a lot of things. I pay Hulu extra for the ad free version. I pay HBO for HBO Now even though I have a pirated Go login. I buy tv shows on iTunes. I'll even buy movies off friggin' Amazon if it means not pirating them. But I will never pay Google to achieve BASIC playback capabilities on other people's content just on PRINCIPLE. Never. Greedy greedy little leeches. YouTube is a great thing but the people who run it have turned Bad.
kyrra 8y ago
The recode[0] and cnet[1] articles have some additional details that people seem to be asking about here. > In a briefing this week, the company promised it will be closing gaps between the two services over the next month, so Google Play Music members don't lose the features they've grown accustomed to, including a cloud-based MP3 storage locker. * Anyone paying today will be grandfathered in at their current price into Youtube Premium. If you aren't paying, Music will cost $10, Premium will be $12 for new subscribers. [0] https://www.recode.net/2018/5/16/17363334/youtube-music-launches-youtube-red-youtube-premium-extra-charge-cobra-kai https://www.recode.net/2018/5/16/17363334/youtube-music-laun... [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-music-is-googles-latest-stab-at-a-spotify-rival/ https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-music-is-googles-latest-st...
circa 8y ago
Just what we need! A new streaming music service!! Who isn't excited?!
jacksmith21006 8y ago
Always been surprised more do not use YouTube Red. The catalog is much larger than any other service by a wide margin. There are songs on YT Red not in any other service.

229 points by ac29 8y ago

YouTube Music, leaving shortly after.

So what is the Youtube Music app that has been on my iPhone for months? And what happens to Google Play Music, google's other music streaming service?

super_trooper 8y ago
May the best app win as usual ;)
fluxsauce 8y ago
> And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change -- you’ll still be able to access all of your purchased music, uploads and playlists in Google Play Music just like always.
- rtpg 8y ago
  Great! The one big reason I sticked with GPM is being able to upload tracks that just aren't on streaming services. I kinda like the social aspects of Spotify but I really like having random OSTs/DJ mixes all in the same spot
kcorbitt 8y ago
The Google Play Music and YouTube Music teams were merged about a year ago, and have been working on producing a single app that can serve both userbases since then. I assume this announcement means they’ve finished that work. (Source: I was on the team at the time, but I’ve been gone for a while at this point.)
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  I really hope it doesn't screw up my Google Play Music workflow / usage but I was just thinking today why can't I just listen to YouTube songs on the same app. Other weirdness was my GPM app didn't load all morning so I listened off the YouTube Music app as a fallback. Btw! Thank you for all your hard work! I am die hard for Google All Music Access! I was happy when Google grandfathered me on to YouTube Red too. You guys have done great work overall.

TimeOutBoss 8y ago

Something they should have done long back, I had to use other Youtube apps just to listen to music in backgroud

realusername 8y ago
I've uninstalled the Youtube app because of this, I understand the business case for it but making the video stop when the app isn't focused is making the Youtube app utterly pointless. The app looks beautiful and obviously they took a lot of effort to build it but this small detail makes it completely unusable unfortunately.
- balls187 8y ago
  I'm not sure your exact use case, but if you are a Youtube red subscriber, the official IOS app continues to play audio if the app is in the background.
  - realusername 8y ago
    Ah really? I'm on Android and don't have a Youtube account at all. I mean the app should work the same way as desktop, the video does not stop when I switch tabs on my browser... I understand that they are trying to sell Youtube Red this way but there's probably a better way than sabotaging their own app.
    - lathiat 8y ago
      I think the reality of why they do this is to stop people using YouTube as a free music player, which unfortunately is a very common usage. It's a shame this restricts other youtube videos too though, such as creators / original content / etc. I'd really also love to use Picture-in-Picture on iOS.
      - Cu3PO42 8y ago
        I can definitely see their reasoning, but like you, I don't like it. There's times where I really just want to listen to something and not need the video without it being music. As for the Picture-in-Picture, there is a somewhat hacky solution. If you go to the video in Safari and install Pipifier (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-every-web-video/id1234771095?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-every-web-v...) you can use it to start Picture-in-Picture. I don't use it that often due to the extra steps involved, but it does work.

fluxsauce 8y ago

I've been a Google Play Music subscriber from the beginning, which means I've enjoyed the grandfathered $7.99 price. That has also extended to YouTube Red. However, this announcement muddies the waters a bit. > If you are a subscriber to Google Play Music, good news, you get a YouTube Music Premium membership as part of your subscription each month. Cool, I guess, except I don't go to YouTube for Music. I really am incredibly interested in YouTube Red. I mean YouTube Premium, I guess. > To extend the features of YouTube Music Premium beyond the music app, we’re soon introducing YouTube Premium, the new name for our YouTube Red subscription service. [describes YouTube Red] If you’re already a YouTube Red (soon to be YouTube Premium) member, don’t worry you’ll still enjoy your current price. So, if you have Google Play Music, do you get YouTube Premium?

mrbill 8y ago
nope, you have to pay $12 to continue having Red. :(
- dannyw 8y ago
  This is extremely disappointing. I’m sure the amount of $7.99 GPM early adopters is minuscule to their metrics, but the cost of goodwill is far higher.
  - bestnameever 8y ago
    > If you’re already a YouTube Red (soon to be YouTube Premium) member I subscribe to google play music but if I look at my youtube red status is says member. So I assume, I will continue to enjoy it at no extra cost. I chatted with google and they said the same but the wording is really confusing...so who knows.
    - amanzi 8y ago
      YouTube Red is the killer feature that keeps me with GPM. If I lose YouTube Red, I'd probably switch back to Spotify.
    - 8y ago

adamnemecek 8y ago

Lol why does google make these also-ran services? Too little too late, I legit dont care. Like what is the differentiator here. Google really doesn't get culture and the internet. The internet lets me listen to weird shit, make it easy to discover underground shit, not fucking Drake and fucking Havana. You know the things played nonstop on the radio. God their product launches legit piss me off. So many resources to make something dope and they produce this watered down diarrhea.

asah 8y ago
You appear to be in the minority: YouTube is the #2 highest trafficked website as of April 2018: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_website... The most recent example: 134,000,000 views in 7 days for This is America. Plus millions more reaction videos, remixes and more. Speaking personally, I absolutely create playlists from music videos.
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  This is related how? Ok why launch a new product? What can I do with this that wasn't possible before?
  - danvayn 8y ago
    .
    - adamnemecek 8y ago
      Lol their recommendation service? Are we using the same product? They are very heavily skewed towards popular things.
      - viraptor 8y ago
        It really depends on your library. If I try the feeling lucky radio on Google music now, I can't spot anything in the first 50 tracks or so that was / would be played on the radio. The prepared mood radios are a bit more mainstream, but still not even close to the radio a/b-list

jypepin 8y ago

Normally when I see this kind of announcement, I think "It will take long before they learn and nail it like the main competition" - in this case Spotify. Spotify seems to be doing a great job curating new music or building playlist specifically for me according to what I listen to, and I can only assume it's 100% automated obviously. Google is so strong with ML today, and not stopping, I don't know what will allow smaller competitors to stay differentiated. I just had a call with a G recruiter, and pretty much 100% of the roles they have in all their European offices are ML-related roles, on most products. And they hire without ML experience, which I think is a sign of how much they are investing in ML. This is no news, but having this call and seeing how little non-ML they had was really eye opening on how much this is G's focus now, and it can only be exponential I assume.

babuskov 8y ago
> Google is so strong with ML today, and not stopping, I don't know what will allow smaller competitors to stay differentiated. If they use the same algorithm YouTube uses to pick videos for me, Spotify doesn't have to worry at all. It just gives me the same things over and over and I never discovered anything worthy from their video suggestions. I have to actively search to find anything new.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
What you’re saying seems like it must be true... Google must be so strong at ML. How could it be otherwise? And yet, YouTube recommendations are terrible lowest common denominator nonsense. It’s just “more of the same” for some surface level definition of “same”. There doesn’t seem to be any playfulness to the learning algorithm at all. No Bayesian experiments. There’s no flex. Amazon too... so much data, so many smart people. Why can’t these companies lead me on a garden path of delights? Why can’t they take my hand and walk with me through the full content space? Why do I continually feel that there are vast delightful segments of the catalog I will never see unless I query for them?
- Benjamin_Dobell 8y ago
  Not just YouTube, Google Play Music's recommendations are truly terrible. I'm regularly being recommended whatever is popular, rather than anything I'll actually listen to. The only time I've ever witnessed Google Play get a recommendation right is when a band I've already added to my library releases a new album. It irks me that after being a subscriber for many years, Google Play still doesn't have anything like Spotify's Discover Weekly. The Google Play Music recommendations are just so god-damn awful. I don't know if it's actually the case, but they come across as ads, not recommendations i.e. Some record label paid lots of money to be "recommended" frequently.

fphhotchips 8y ago

Loyal YouTube Red subscriber here. I don't care about music. I have Spotify for that. All I want is for them to unbreak Chromecast in the new desktop interface.

birdman3131 8y ago

What sells me on spotify is the ability to control it from any device. Listening on my phone while at my computer? Hit skip on my keyboard and the phone skips to the next track. Playing on my Dot? I can pause right from my phone. Ditto with volume control. I wanted to like amazon music but I could not because of the lack of these features.

iforgotpassword 8y ago
Did you set this up manually? I'm not using Spotify but this sounds rather confusing. Is it at least smart enough to recognize when there's something else playing on your computer and send the skip command to that app instead of your phone if you hit the skip key?
- weavie 8y ago
  It knows which device is currently playing. Anything you do sends it to the currently playing device. You can pull up a list of all connected devices and select which one you want to be playing. It then starts on the new device from where the old one left off. It works really well. I have my raspberry pi plugged into my amplifier, and play through that. I control it with my phone or laptop, whichever is nearer.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I think the question is about the media keys. What happens if your phone is playing something on Spotify, and your laptop is playing something on VLC, but also has Spotify open? Does pressing the skip media key make both players skip, or just one of them?
    - weavie 8y ago
      Ah interesting question. This thread implies that there can be a war between apps fighting for control https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Media-keys-no-longer-work/td-p/807591. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Media-keys-.... I've never really used the media keys, so have no idea how it really works in practice. Might have a play when I get home later.

marky_nolan 8y ago

Google trying to get into everything it can.

Saad4u 8y ago
This is business, my friend. :)

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

Cool, now we pay for poorly ripped 128kbps streaming music?

Applejinx 8y ago
In my experience, 124kbps.

chrisper 8y ago

Let me guess. It's going to be US only again as always even though I pay for it... (like my GPM subscription price is not cheaper because parts of it are not available)

balls187 8y ago
It's in the article. Starting Tuesday, we're rolling out the new YouTube Music experience in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Korea*. It will expand more broadly in the coming weeks. We’ll also soon be launching in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
- chrisper 8y ago
  Not sure how I missed that. Thanks!
- pjmlp 8y ago
  As usual, just a few privileged European countries. Looking forward for an EU wide law to force lazy US companies to either offer the service to everyone or not at all.
  - briandear 8y ago
    What is your “unprivileged” country? And just FYI, Apple Music is available there.
    - darklajid 8y ago
      Not the GP: Singapore here..
    - tobyhinloopen 8y ago
      The Netherlands
    - pjmlp 8y ago

MichaelGG 8y ago

If it'll let me play YouTube audio on my Sonos it'd be a great feature. Otherwise I'm not quite getting the value. Workaround for this is to buy an HDMI splitter and send the audio to a sound system then use Chromecast, but Sonos is just so convenient.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cma 8y ago

Why can't I cast a Youtube video's audio to chromecast audio? The only way is to share the whole screen which burns battery and causes skipping if your wifi isn't perfect.

izacus 8y ago
Because copyright holders don't allow you to. They want you to pay for music and not listen to it for free on YouTube. This is why any kind of videoless playback is disabled without Red subscription.
- mkj 8y ago
  Chromecast audio for youtube doesn't work even if you pay for google music (includes youtube red). My theory is that it's too hard to get video/audio sync like that, so they don't allow it. Same for sending youtube audio to Sonos. Copyright holders still might be the reason though.
  - izacus 8y ago
    Yeah, YouTube Music does work though. Inability to listen to talks et al. via only audio is really annoying me too though.
hndamien 8y ago
I think you need premium.
hoppelhase 8y ago
Maybe there's more to it. The YT API also does not allow to present Video Streams (Audio/Video) separately.

ikeboy 8y ago

>If you are a subscriber to Google Play Music, good news, you get a YouTube Music Premium membership as part of your subscription each month. Calling it now, within 5 years there are at least 5 different Google services for streaming music (up from 3 now, Play Music/Youtube/Youtube Music) at least 2 of which are also somehow messaging apps. It's even plausible, one for VR music videos, one for streaming in your self driving google car?

viraptor 8y ago
YouTube already includes comments and a chat on live streams, so close to a messaging app ;-) Seriously though, YouTube is not a music service, or at least it looks like they don't want it to be, since the interface isn't really great for that case. It also kills phone battery if you use it that way, so YouTube music is an experience upgrade.
- ikeboy 8y ago
  I mean the top videos are pretty much all music videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_vi...
- csydas 8y ago
  > so YouTube music is an experience upgrade. Based on the press release, it doesn't seem so. It's basically just added a "music only" option, but otherwise it seems to just be a curated section of Youtube that only involves musical content. The same experience you get with vanilla Youtube seems to be applicable. And looking at the pricing, you still get all the battery pitfalls baked into Youtube unless you buy premium. Honestly, it feels more like an attempt to curate Youtube rather than developing a music app. Right now the top video content competes with the published Music content and likely just creates a really weird imbalance in the algorithm toppers. Personally, I think they could have just handled this with some better organization within Youtube, but here we are with a new app.
- kuschku 8y ago
  Actually, YouTube also has a second chat app included.

code_duck 8y ago

I’ve been using the YouTube Music app for several months now. I find it convenient in some ways, but overall less polished and less useful than the main YouTube app - a conclusion I only came to recently and after the most recent, somewhat buggy update, which often displays the incorrect song playing on my iPhone lock screen, and incorporates slidey actions that interfere with iOS menus. I like that it has a playlist where you can easily see and skip back to history. The main thing that has me using the standard app now is that Music has only a subset of videos available. I’ve been listening to a lot of obscure music lately, and I’ve started to come up with situations where 65% of the videos are available in the Music app and 100% in the YouTube app. I would love to use a YouTube app for music, but it can’t be a second tier service to the main one.

mrweasel 8y ago

I don't really care about the music part, but it's great to see that Youtube Red/Premium will be available in more countries. It never made sense that you couldn't buy YouTube Red outside a few countries. YouTube doesn't have enough advertisers in some market (e.g. in Denmark), so you end up skipping the same five ads constantly. So financially is seemed that Red should have been made available in countries with few advertisers first, rather than showing me ads for YouTube itself.

viraptor 8y ago

I hope that will allow the streaming accounts like lo-fi and synth radios to live stream music itself without the looped image. I really like the ChilledCow, but always felt it's wasted bandwidth to get the video stream with them.

tokyodude 8y ago

YouTube is the only service I've used that gets WORSE if you pay. Without paying I can watch one video on my TV while browsing other videos on my laptop to queue up. With paying as soon as look up a video on my laptop I get an error on the tv "only one device allowed"

dexen 8y ago
They are following in the footsteps of the movie industry, which also provides worse experience to the paying customer. Pay for movie theater ticket, get served 30+ minutes of ads. (edit) Pay for DVD, get unskippable "antipiracy ads". Torrent the movie, and you'll be watching the movie in under 3 minutes of download.
- Moter8 8y ago
  Almost instantly nowadays, because there are streaming torrent programs.
- Already__Taken 8y ago
  They keep trying to make it more like TV. Seemingly oblivious to the generation using it exclusively because it's not TV.
  - mcintyre1994 8y ago
    I guess giant TV advertising budgets are sticky and they're trying to figure out how to shift them to YouTube?
- pferdone 8y ago
  I wouldn't call an IMAX setup a 'subpar experience'
  - Maro 8y ago
    These days, when I have a movie ticket for time T, I plan to arrive at T+20 minutes. That's when the ads are over, roughly when the trailers are playing.

ksec 8y ago

I reread this multiple times, and not getting it. ( As with pretty much all things google does, apart from its search engine ) So does it stop me from just watching Music Video for free on Youtube? If not, then why would I subscribe? Surely I must be missing something here.

chii 8y ago
you can't play youtube videos _and_ run another app at the same time (background play) without paying.
- pjc50 8y ago
  ... or using the strangely named "newpipe"
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Or using Firefox for Android with the Video Background Play Fix addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
    - ThatPlayer 8y ago
      None of those offer a nice feature I have in the current YouTube Red app: an offline mixtape, which is actually dynamically generated once a day or so. I like it because I can find a song, and listen to it multiple times on my computer, and it'll be the app will automatically download it afterwards.

lostmsu 8y ago

I like how YouTube Music is like Skype for Business or any other mostly unrelated product being dragged by a brand.

vesak 8y ago

Did someone decipher what happens to albums bought in Google Music? It seems all the time a better and better idea that I went to Apple Music.

Ajedi32 8y ago
This statement seems pretty clear to me: > And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change

unixhero 8y ago

I already have it. The app is called YouTube Vanced. It's brilliant.

heavymark 8y ago

Their music apps were already confusing and now more so. On iOS you had YouTube for videos and YT Music for Music (that also shows videos) for 10 a month. So now you can also pay 10 a month to get YT Red but without any videos? Why not just have an option in settings to hide videos in YT Music. Since then you could watch them when battery life. I personally love YT Music/Red or whatever they are calling it but the branding of the services seems all over the map.

em3rgent0rdr 8y ago

How long until it's discontinued? Oh, and btw, with tools like NewPipe, I can listen without ads.

wlkr 8y ago
I only discovered NewPipe recently and it's a really great app. For those unaware NewPipe is an alternate YouTube app on F-Droid which has loads of nifty features such as being able to play the audio of videos in the background so you can shut off the screen. It will even handle subscriptions for you without any sign in. https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/
izacus 8y ago
> Oh, and btw, with tools like NewPipe, I can listen without ads. Just remember that for copyright holders of those songs you're effectively doing the same thing as just torrenting the mp3. ;)
JeremyBanks 8y ago
Probably never, if you think about it instead of falling back to a meme. With tool like guns, I can get my my groceries without paying money. But that’s not very relevant to the general grocery experience.
ravenstine 8y ago
NewPipe is brilliant! I don't even care so much about the ads(still HATE ads), but the interface is superior in almost every way. The YouTube app, as with all of Google's clunky Android apps, takes several seconds to load, is slow, cluttered, and annoys me with notifications for "trending" videos. It's the second worst Google app to Maps, which is embarrassingly slow and gets worse with every update. NewPipe, on the other hand, has a low memory footprint, boots up immediately, has a clean interface, doesn't remove features, lets me queue up videos in the background, lets me choose audio-only, etc. The only thing it's missing is Chromecast, but then again I haven't updated NewPipe in a while, and Chromecast kinda blows anyway. I'd say Google should just discontinue the YouTube app and use the NewPipe codebase, but I won't say that because I know they'd destroy it. NewPipe literally blows people's minds when I show it to them. They can't grasp how there can be another app for YouTube that's better. Sadly, these people are too afraid to use F-Droid, even though the Play Store has its share of malicious software.

sidyapa 8y ago

Just a suggestion, why not just allow background playback instead of spending your millions on another streaming app which would be ideally better than competition in single digit %s?

JeremyBanks 8y ago
Background playback has been available with YouTube Red/Premium for years.

dvcrn 8y ago

I wonder what happens to self-uploaded music. I read that it's being migrated, but will we still be able to upload, or will this disappear? The only reason why I'm not with Spotify, but with Google Music (or now Apple music as test) is because I have a lot of songs that are just not covered in their catalogues that I uploaded myself.

reificator 8y ago
Yep. Good old Tool, who won't let any streaming service use their music because it devalues the experience of listening to a full album. Except that it's been available on Pandora for years, which is the only major streaming service that doesn't allow you to listen to full albums.
karpodiem 8y ago
This is the $1000 question. Google Play Music will live in the short term, but this comment from Google indicates that Google Play Music will eventually be retired - “it’s critical we have one offering that meets the needs of consumers and artists.” Source - https://www.droid-life.com/2018/05/16/youtube-music-price-launch-date/ https://www.droid-life.com/2018/05/16/youtube-music-price-la... Will YouTube Music launch with feature parity w/Google Play Music and offer an upload function so that users can stream tracks they upload themselves?
Ajedi32 8y ago
The post explicitly says: > And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change -- you’ll still be able to access all of your purchased music, uploads and playlists in Google Play Music just like always.
- dvcrn 8y ago
  Yes, uploaded music will be available but this doesn't cover if we will still be able to upload new music going forward.

INTPenis 8y ago

This seems redundant but I do know a lot of people who find it easier to turn on music via youtube than any other service, for some reason. Personally I think this should have been a move for more user generated content categories within Google Play Music instead of altering the Youtube concept. Because anything other than user generated content and you have to assume that Alphabet already has permission to play it in one service, then why not get permission to play it in their actual music service.

swebs 8y ago

I'm worried about using a service like this after Youtube started censoring videos that don't match their political ideology. Will YouTube Music be censoring songs that have references to guns? Are they going to randomly demonetize songs that use bad language? Why not just use Spotify then?

theNJR 8y ago
Who is also censoring based on their ideology...
- darkstar999 8y ago
  Spotify. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-05-10/spotify-announces-new-hate-content-and-hateful-conduct-public-policy/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-05-10/spotify-announces-ne... Although they aren't removing music or changing it, they just don't put it in their curated or autogenerated playlists.
anchpop 8y ago
The competition is fierce enough in this field that that's not really an option for them
- Mindwipe 8y ago
  Google Play Music never really made playing uncensored music work, and that never bothered them. If you uploaded tracks you'd frequently get the radio edit played back.

sandrobfc 8y ago

Everything I needed from YouTube for it to become a "music streaming service" was the possibility to leave the app without it closing the damn video. Other than that, if they can keep all the live concerts they have now in audio only, it could be cool, but I would hardly change from my current service.

Cub3 8y ago

Have they figured out family plans with "Google Apps" accounts yet? I just want a Google family plan with a custom domain for my email, still can't figure out how to do this. Also when I click: > try “that hipster song with the whistling” The uploader has not made this video available in your country.

luma 8y ago
I don't know that this is ever going to change. I'm stuck in the same situation - as a paying GSuite user you aren't able to use several Google features for reasons I'm not exactly clear on.

rando444 8y ago

The best part about music on youtube is all of the songs uploaded by people who don't have the rights... and for some reason don't get them taken down, despite often monetizing them. Will be interesting to see how this fits into their new model.

userbinator 8y ago
The rights owners get a cut of the monetisation too, so it gives a reason to leave them there.

userbinator 8y ago

Coincidentally, I've already been using YouTube as a "music streaming service" for many years --- youtube-dl, mpv, and some Perl scripts holding it all together.

n4r9 8y ago
Interesting! Do you have a way to search for particular tracks and load them into a queue via the command line? That would be awesome.
Sylos 8y ago
For a more integrated experience, there's also: https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

bsharitt 8y ago

>If you are a subscriber to Google Play Music, good news, you get a YouTube Music Premium membership as part of your subscription each month. And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change Right now I get YouTube Red with my Google Play Music subscription, so it sounds like I'm losing that, that's actually a very big change. Instead of a nice little add on, I now get a subscription to a completely redundant service instead.

ebiester 8y ago
I may be naive, but I don’t think they meant to say the two were unbundled. They’re changing the name of YouTube Red to YouTube premium but it seems like they’re keeping the two bundled.
- bsharitt 8y ago
  They specifically mention that Google Play Music subscribers will be getting access to YouTube Music, so I would take that to mean not YouTube Premium(i.e. renamed Red).

vthallam 8y ago

Man this is so confusing! I had to read the blog post twice to understand what service should one have to get Play Music, Youtube Red and new Youtube Music subscription. > YouTube Premium will continue to provide an ad-free experience, background play, and downloads across the millions of videos on YouTube. But because it includes our brand new YouTube Music service, the price will be $11.99 for all new members TLDR : You pay $11.99 to get all premium youtube and Play music offers.

dandare 8y ago

All I need is the ability to listen to the audio of YT videos with my phone screen off.

gschier 8y ago
YouTub Red gives you that... If it's available in your country..
Ajedi32 8y ago
YouTube Red (now YouTube Premium) allows this.
dTal 8y ago
NewPipe has a "background mode". There's a short hiccup when you switch to "background mode" but you can still control it from there so it's not so bad. I find it shocking that Google is permitted to charge money for a feature like that, when as far as I can tell most of the music on Youtube was uploaded without permission of the copyright owner.
- Sylos 8y ago
  I mean, they're not, according to their own ToS (or even their own interpretation of it). It says something in there along the lines of video and audio may not be separated. On the basis of which, they ran a witch hunt on all 3rd party YouTube apps on the Play Store, which had a background playback feature. This in itself makes no sense, as separating video and audio during playback had always been possible on the desktop by simply switching to a different tab in your browser or minimizing the window. But obviously, this wasn't about showing integrity. They published YouTube Red with its background playback feature just a few months after this witchhunt. And since the Play Store is their property, they didn't even need a legitimate basis for throwing these apps out. They own the market, so they were able to just shut out the competition. Don't build your life on Google property...

wnevets 8y ago

Why? Google music largely works well.

darkstar999 8y ago
> [...]YouTube’s tremendous catalog of remixes, live performances, covers and music videos that you can’t find anywhere else

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dbtqgoat 8y ago

How is this different than the YouTube Music that I already have installed on my phone

KasianFranks 8y ago

It won't be any good without 2 things: 1. A good music recommendation system 2. Crypto

ibdf 8y ago

Do they really need to rebrand every time they fix a bug or offer some improvements? Yes, I'm exaggerating, but how do you expect to create a market of loyal users for something we don't know will last more than year?

hb3b 8y ago
It's insane, right? You would think with their talent pool and billion dollar-sized budgets they wouldn't struggle with basic brand marketing. The insulting part of this change is that they are raising prices and further fragmenting an already half-baked service. Google needs to take advice from someone like John Legere and start building cohesive products. https://www.geekwire.com/2016/listen-shut-f-tell-t-mobiles-john-legere-shares-leadership-advice/ https://www.geekwire.com/2016/listen-shut-f-tell-t-mobiles-j...

macspoofing 8y ago

The way Google brands products reminds me of Microsoft when they tried to attach an unrelated product to a moderately popular consumer brand (Looking at you Groove Music, I mean Xbox Music, I mean Zune Music) There is nothing wrong with Google Play Music apart from the 'Play' misnomer. Google Music should be a standalone product that competes with Spotify. It's a well defined and well understood category. YouTube is a different product, used by different people, for different purposes and in different ways. Now you're confusing everything. Can I get audio-only version of YouTube videos or just YouTube music videos or does it have to be an audio-only upload? Does that mean you can have audio-only YouTube videos now (even without putting in some reference image?)? Is it going to kill my bandwidth if I try to stream on LTE? Is it going to replace Google Music? Are my playlists in Google Music and YouTube going to be replaced? Will there be YouTube comments on music (I hope not)? Can anybody upload to YouTube music? A year ago Google added mediocre support for podcasts to Google Music instead of building a dedicated app - will YouTube Music handle podcasts? URGH! All they needed to do was to add background playback to YouTube and maybe a little link to the YouTube video in Google Music, and if you're watching a music video on YouTube, a link to a streaming service of your choice (like Google Music, Spotify or Apple Music). Given how poorly this has been thought through, you just know in 2 years there will be another rebrand.

emodendroket 8y ago
In principle at least, it might be nice to have live performances and music videos too.
brianpgordon 8y ago
Just so you're aware, you already get background playback on mobile devices if you pay for YouTube Red.
- mapgrep 8y ago
  I find this the height of arrogance that Google charges for this and it enrages me on a level I freely admit is irrational and pointless. But just the gall: 1. Get FREE creative work from musicians, film types, tv types, and tons of bright friendly ordinary people 2. Monetize the hell out of it (fine) 3. Allow a sewer community of racists bullies and other terrible people to develop in comments section (negligent but ok it's gotten a little better) 4. Make it hard for visitors to extract original media even though you're purporting to be a hosting service (lame but I can live with it) 5. Cripple playback in basic ways for petty reasons (you're starting to really suck) 6. Try and CHARGE people to undo 5 (Gah!!!!! Die!!!) I pay for a lot of things. I pay Hulu extra for the ad free version. I pay HBO for HBO Now even though I have a pirated Go login. I buy tv shows on iTunes. I'll even buy movies off friggin' Amazon if it means not pirating them. But I will never pay Google to achieve BASIC playback capabilities on other people's content just on PRINCIPLE. Never. Greedy greedy little leeches. YouTube is a great thing but the people who run it have turned Bad.

kyrra 8y ago

The recode[0] and cnet[1] articles have some additional details that people seem to be asking about here. > In a briefing this week, the company promised it will be closing gaps between the two services over the next month, so Google Play Music members don't lose the features they've grown accustomed to, including a cloud-based MP3 storage locker. * Anyone paying today will be grandfathered in at their current price into Youtube Premium. If you aren't paying, Music will cost $10, Premium will be $12 for new subscribers. [0] https://www.recode.net/2018/5/16/17363334/youtube-music-launches-youtube-red-youtube-premium-extra-charge-cobra-kai https://www.recode.net/2018/5/16/17363334/youtube-music-laun... [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-music-is-googles-latest-stab-at-a-spotify-rival/ https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-music-is-googles-latest-st...

circa 8y ago

Just what we need! A new streaming music service!! Who isn't excited?!

jacksmith21006 8y ago

Always been surprised more do not use YouTube Red. The catalog is much larger than any other service by a wide margin. There are songs on YT Red not in any other service.