Google’s YouTube is planning on launching a subscription music service later this year, to take on the likes of Spotify, Deezer, iROKING, Spinlet e.t.c according to Fortune. This will likely have some overlap with new features also rumored to be coming to Google’s Android music platform, Google Play.
Google Play for Android is a digital locker for music — users buy, store, and sort a collection of tracks; but on YouTube’s coming service, anyone can listen to tracks for free. Both services are said to be adding a subscription fee that will unlock additional features. For the YouTube-based service, this will likely mean ad-free access.
YouTube is already one of the most heavily used music services in the world, but it hasn’t yet charged users. Instead, it sells ads against its music videos.
Google is entering an already crowded field: Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, Soundcloud, and Muve Music all offer customers similar access to large online music libraries. Apple is rumored to be building a “radio” feature in its iTunes program that would deliver streaming music based upon a user’s tastes — a service something like Pandora — that further merges the experience of being in a “store” to purchase music, and then listening to it in a “player.”
Beats By Dre, the headphone and speaker company, recently announced that it, too, would launch a streaming music service. It will be named Daisy — a reference to the first song “sung” by a computer.
