Monday, October 28, 2013

The Real Reason Behind YouTube’s New Music Streaming Service

YouTube Music image
By now you’ve heard the reports that YouTube is preparing its own music streaming service, and although the company hasn’t officially confirmed it, accounts of numerous recent private showings of the service to select partners have appeared. On the surface you can look at the prospect of a YouTube music streaming service and ask why it’s necessary, since parent company Google already has one of its own in Google Play Music All Access (this name has to be at least four syllables too long). Then you might wonder what YouTube has to offer that’s not being offered by numerous other services already. I’m glad you asked.

Let me say up front that I have very little insider information on the subject and haven’t seen the service myself, but you can figure a number of things out by just looking at the current landscape of the streaming music business and Google and YouTube’s place in it already.

First of all is that terribly long name for Google’s existing music service (Google Play Music All Access). I don’t care how big a company Google is, that’s not a brand that a user can get behind. Imagine a kid trying to explain this cool new service she just found and then tries to spit out that tongue twister of a brand name. About the only thing you can count on her getting right is “Google.” 


YouTube, on the other hand, is a brand that everyone knows, and most kids already use  it to discover their music. It has a built-in hard-core audience that contains precisely the prime demographic for consuming music (14 to 24 years old), plus another billion (with a “b”) or so active users. Adding a streaming music function becomes only just a new YouTube feature, not a new service. Read more on Forbes.
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