At simultaneous press conferences in New York City and San Francisco yesterday, YouTube finally revealed their plans to rule the streaming music world. While the tech giant might be a little late to the party, it is off to a great start (and it hasn’t even really “started” yet).
The Google-owned video service is launching Red next week, which will ask viewers (or listeners, depending on how users are being labeled) to pay the now-industry standard $9.99 per month for unlimited ad-free playing. In addition, Red will also allow people to save videos for offline playing, and users will be able to use other apps on their phones and still hear what’s playing in the background—something the YouTube app does not currently allow.
So, what does YouTube have going for it as it enters the ring with names like Spotify, Pandora, Deezer, Rdio, and the like? Quite a bit, actually.
Robert Kyncl, YouTube Chief Business Officer, speaks as YouTube unveils “YouTube Red,” a new subscription service, at YouTube Space LA offices Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2015, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Danny Moloshok)
Video
This one is pretty obvious, but its importance should not be undervalued. While music is mostly about the listening, the visual aspect adds so much to the experience, and people love music videos of all kinds. Making music videos, like music itself, has become a lot more democratic, and these days anyone can create something high quality that could go viral, helping to spur a song’s popularity onward and upward.
While artists tout their millions of streams on Spotify or Soundcloud, that figure could be in the tenfold on YouTube. For example, earlier this month, Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” became the first track to hit 500 million streams on Spotify, and it only took just over a year. Comparatively, Wiz Khalifa’s megahit “See You Again” needed less than half that time to reach the one billion-play mark on YouTube, and it’s the tenth to do so.
Familiarity
One of the big hurdles that the streaming industry faces is that there are plenty of people who don’t know how it works, and learning an entirely new program can be daunting for some. There probably isn’t anybody left on the planet who isn’t familiar with YouTube and how it works, and it sounds like Red won’t have much of a learning curve. Even if the site changes slightly, the world knows and loves (for the most part) YouTube, and that attachment is very powerful.
Content
With streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and iHeartRadio, it is pretty obvious what you’re getting: music, and that’s all. The same cannot be said for YouTube, which hosts a ton of different kinds of content, some of which blurs the line between music and other categories. Between mashups, parodies, covers, remixes, and so on, there are likely as many clips on YouTube that might not fit under the strict title of “just music” that other companies use as there are songs on even the biggest of players in the industry.
There is no way of knowing how many people will decide to pay for Red, but at this point, it’s almost surely going to attract some pretty impressive figures.
Article by Forbes.
