Newsletter
According to some reports today from the Financial Times, the streaming music service from YouTube that we have known about for some time is supposedly set to launch “within weeks” from now. That’ll mark Google down for a third streaming music service that will be joining alongside the already available Google Play Music All Access as well as the now Google owned Songza that it acquired earlier this year. We reported on the streaming music service from YouTube before back in August, and about some of the things that it would offer differently from other streaming music services, like the ability to save content for offline viewing as well as streaming without ads. The service from YouTube will of course be a paid service if you want to stream content from it, much like All Access. It also comes with ad-free listening, another feature that Google has already been using with All Access since it launched.
While the better part of a year has been the stage for the unofficial announcements on Google’s plans to bring this service to fruition, the search company is now said to be ready to kick off the launch soon, as they have struck a deal with a large number of indie record labels to license the music in which they represent, with the source citing examples such as Adele and the Arctic Monkeys as a kind of bargaining chip for YouTube, using the removal of their music videos from the site as a means to get the rights agency Merlin to sign the deal. Merlin represents thousands of indie record labels, many of which or all will presumably included in the YouTube streaming service for users to have access to.
With Merlin on board, YouTube now has licensing rights with nearly 20,000 independent labels alongside the likes of three major labels; Universal, Sony, and Warner, which should give YouTube a vast library of content to offer to users. There are no specific terms of the deal met between YouTube and Merlin, and while we don’t have an exact date on when we can expect to be able to download and install the app as well as sign up for the service, within weeks suggests that it should be available sometime either before December or before December is over. We might as well consider this a Christmas gift from Google.