“Google is remixing the music on its YouTube video site with the addition of an ad-free subscription service and a new format designed to make it easier to find millions of songs that can still be played for free,” Michael Liedtke reports for The Associated Press. “The overhaul announced Wednesday includes “Music Key,” a subscription service that has been speculated about for months while Google Inc. wrangled over the licensing terms with recording labels.”
“Music Key initially will be offered on an invitation-only basis in the U.S., United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Finland,” Liedtke reports. “After a free six-month trial period, Music Key will temporarily charge $8 per month before escalating to its standard price of $10 per month. That’s comparable to other digital music subscription services sold by Spotify, Apple Inc.’s Beats and Google’s own 18-month-old streaming service tied to its Android ‘Play’ store.”
“Besides removing all ads, Music Key also will give its subscribers two other perks: the ability to continue playing songs on mobile devices when its app is closed and the option to download tracks so they can be played without an Internet connection,” Liedtke reports. “The offline music can only be played in Music Key’s mobile app.”
Read more in the full article here.
How offal!
The differences being Google will serve you up ads based on your listening habits, likely track your location (to ONLY offer you concert information for your favorite artist – sure) and leverage all that information on any device where you sign in to Google’s services so they can spam/track you constantly.
All that for the same price as Apple and Spotify? Where do I sign up?
‘Nobody wants to subscribe to music. They’ve bought it for 50 years. They bought 45s, they bought LPs, they bought 8-tracks, they bought cassettes, they bought CDs. Why would they want to start renting their music? People like to buy it and they like to do what they damn well please with it when they buy it. The subscription model of buying music was bankrupt. I think you could’ve made available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not have been successfull
‘Steve Jobs Bio: The Unauthorized Autobiography.’
Meh, music lovers want to own their music and the sheep are fine with listening to the radio or as it’s now called, Spotify.
I’d sooner give up my desktop and devices than let Google, Amazon or the rest take my money or personal information.
Good quote. There is a huge difference though. The original subscription services required you to download tracks. These tracks then resided on your computer or phone, but you had to keep paying or they locked up. This rubbed people the wrong way.
The new subscription services stream the tracks over today’s much faster internet. Since you never permanently download anything, it seems more like a custom radio service, which the market is fine with.
So yeah, the old-style subscription services like Rhapsody and Napster are now mostly-forgotten flops. But the new-style subscriptions services are probably the wave of the future.
(As for me, I’m just going to keep buying my music.)
——RM
I don’t care what it is or how great it is, i’m not paying $10 per month to youtube or any other website. imagine if paying a monthly fee to websites became the norm? internet would die fast.
I asked many artists how much they are making from streaming services and they all say it’s nothing. It adds up to pennies compared to any other distribution system. Unless your a major label or top 20 performer. It isn’t worth tracking. So it’s bad for 99% of artists and sucks for anyone that loves music.
I think I’ll just continue to get my music off Pirate Bay and just copy it over to my phone the way sane people do it.
Thanks.
I hope the music industry attorneys come pay you a visit, you leech.
Music industry attorneys aren’t the only people that should be paying me a visit.
But it’s unlikely that’ll ever happen because I use PeerBlock. They can’t connect to my machine at all.
the way sane people do it.
You misspelled “assholes”.
——RM
Removing all ads my butt!
What? YouTube is video! Why would I want to pay for music with video when
1. I normally don’t watch the video, but listen only to the music.
2. It would eat up my data allotment on my cellular plan if I’m not connected to WiFi.
3. It’s more expensive than NetFlix! (Comparison made because it is video.)
This doesn’t seem well thought out at all….. my prediction is DOOM….
Well actually…
A few months back, YouTube changed they way they stream video. You now have two separate streams going on at the same time. The video stream and the audio stream. I’m assuming what they’ll be doing with this is only accessing the audio stream. So it shouldn’t use up any more data than say Pandora or Spotify.