There are intriguing clues to the idea that Google Google might be about to launch a subscription streaming service on YouTube. The clues today are technological, coming from a teardown of YouTube 5.3. There are strings in there that indicate that there will be unlimited music offerings, offline abilities and ad free options. All of these will of course need to have royalties paid upon them by Google to the rights holders so Google must be, in the absence of ads, intending to charge something for this service. The finding is over at APK Teardown:
Offline playback (music? video? both?), background listening, “uninterrupted music,” and “no ads on millions of songs” are all mentioned. No ads is obviously a component of the paid service, just like Google Play Music and the premium versions of Pandora and Spotify. But notice that it doesn’t simply say “no ads,” it’s “no ads on millions of songs.” It’s likely that Google needed to negotiate the rights for the YouTube Music Pass service separately from Google Play Music since music videos are legally and commercially distinct from their songs. So does that mean that the service is truly ad-free, or that a portion of the songs and/or music videos on offer will have ads that further benefit the music labels?
I’m not sure about those different rights though. It’s true that the two are legally and commercially distinct (certainly in the early days the videos were offered royalty free, as a method of marketing, even if that’s no longer the case) but we’ve had an earlier point made about Google negotiating for both sets of rights together:
YouTube, through its parent company Google, already secured most of the licenses it needs to launch a music service earlier this year, beginning with Warner Music Group in March, followed by Sony Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. The licenses obtained were for both Google’s All Access service, which launched in May, and for a YouTube music service.
There’s definitely something afoot and the expectation is that there will be the usual ad supported ability to listen to/watch unlimited material and then the paid level offering an ad free capability. Given how crowded this space is now, what with Pandora, Spotify, Apple Apple, Google’s own All Access and so on, we might wonder whether there’s really all that much room for another new entrant. People are only likely to subscribe to one streaming service after all as there’s no great difference in the catalogue available at each one. Although YouTube might marginally win that, given the amount of user uploaded material it carries (along with a certain amount of stuff that isn’t supposed to be there of course). But the thinking is that the paid service will be pretty much a soft sell. Google makes good money out of the ad based YouTube as it is and could quite happily continue with that model. So the contention is that rather than viewing the paid service as a necessary new “must have” service, it’s more of a way to keep people who really don’t want ads, to stop them going off to one of the other paid services.
Google, of course, isn’t commenting on this potential new service: they never do.
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