YouTube's paid subscription music platform is finally here

Nov 13, 2014 07:58 GMT  ·  By

It’s been a long time coming, but YouTube’s paid subscription music platform is finally here and it’s called YouTube Music Key.

The long-awaited service offers quite a few cool things, making it worth the wait. The beta that’s being launched today offers something that people have been asking for a long time – listening to music without ads. The service also offers users the chance to play music even if you lock the screen or start using another app, but also to play music even if you’re not connected to the Internet.

The monthly subscription service starts with the promotional price of $7.99 per month, down from $9.99 which is the standard price. YouTube Music Key offers ad-free music, background play, offline viewing and comes with a subscription to Google Play Music, with over 30 million songs, expert-curated playlists and the ability to watch YouTube official music videos from the app.

“Thanks to your music videos, remixes, covers, and more, you’ve made YouTube the biggest music service on the planet. To turn YouTube into your perfect music service, we’re launching YouTube Music Key as a beta with our biggest music fans first, and then we’ll bring YouTube Music Key to the whole world together. So, if you see an invite in your app or email, try it out for six months for free,” YouTube’s team writes.

Changes to YouTube are also rolling out

The company has also announced that you’ll notice that there’s a new home just for music on the YouTube apps for Android, iOS and YouTube.com which shows your favorite music videos, as well as recommended music playlists based on what you like and playlists of trending music on YouTube.

The service also brings in full albums in high-quality audio that, when streamed on a mobile phone, for instance, won’t doom your entire bandwidth. “If a song exists in this world, you can probably find it on YouTube. But until today you couldn’t easily find and play full albums. 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,” the company writes in the announcement.

This is, of course, quite similar to what other music streaming services are offering nowadays, minus the music video part.

YouTube is slowly turning into the go-to music platform, which could be a serious competitor for the likes of Spotify. Mixing in music streaming with video watching is not something that other tools offer and this will make YouTube stand out.

The service already has a huge user base and many of them will choose to make the jump towards Music Key just so they can skip the ads and listen to music on the go on their smartphones. The price isn’t that steep, especially considering that you also get a Google Play Music subscription in the same package.

YouTube Music Key (4 Images)

Meet Music Key
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