YouTube recently announced the launch of YouTube Music Key as a streaming music alternative to the likes of Spotify,Pandora, LastFM and several others. Currently an invite-only service, once live and open to the public, for $9.99 a month, you’ll have access to these key features:
- Ad-Free music
- Offline Play
- Unlimited Access to Google Play Music
But is YouTube Music Key a big deal?
You bet and here’s why.
- YouTube is already the largest music streaming service, simply by virtue of its music videos streamed by millions of fans. So it makes sense (and dollars) to parlay its web traffic into a more established business model.
- Features like being ad-free or the ability to play your music offline by itself aren’t a big deal – most competitive services also have these features. But leveraging the Google Music library with access to 30 million songs (and videos) is nothing to sneeze at.
- Google ecosystem integration – potentially a game changer. The other services stand-alone with their only connection being to social media channels of the user. While this is speculative and not an actual listed feature, given how the Google system works, you can safely bet it’ll leverage its other applications somehow.
It’ll be well into 2015 before we see how YouTube Music Key plays out. With the right features and app execution, you can rest assured they will take a chunk of change from the competition. Are you going to sign up?
