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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 28 2017, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the sing-a-song-of-six-pence dept.

Two music-related Google subscription services, YouTube Red and Google Play Music, are going to be merged:

Right now, YouTube's music ecosystem is unnecessarily complicated. There's YouTube Red, which removes ads from videos and lets you save them offline, while also giving you access to Google Play Music for free. Then there's YouTube Music, which anyone can use, but it gets better if you're signed up for YouTube Red. And YouTube TV is also a thing — an entirely separate thing — but it's not available everywhere yet.

The merger has been rumored within the industry for months, and recently picked up steam after Google combined the teams working on the two streaming services earlier this year.

In a statement to The Verge, Google said it will notify users of any changes before they happen. "Music is very important to Google and we're evaluating how to bring together our music offerings to deliver the best possible product for our users, music partners and artists. Nothing will change for users today and we'll provide plenty of notice before any changes are made."

It doesn't look like YouTube's users want to pay for what they can get for free a click or two away:

The comments came after [Tom] Silverman raved about his experience using YouTube Red, but said that when he mentions to people how much he likes the service they "look at me like I have two heads. They didn't even know you can subscribe. How come people don't know about it?"

"You probably don't know there is Google Play Music either, and people really love that, too," [Lyor] Cohen replied.

That exchange gets to the heart of the existential issue facing Google's two streaming services: identity. Neither service has gained much traction in the music-streaming marketplace despite their best efforts and Google's massive user base. While Google hasn't released subscriber numbers,YouTube Red, which launched in Oct. 2015, was estimated to have 1.5 million as of late last year; Google Music Play has more than double that number. One industry source put their combined paid user numbers at 7 million -- far behind Spotify's recently-announced 50 million and Apple's 27 million subscribers.

The lack of identity for Google's music services in the marketplace may also be due, in part, to the runaway success and ease of use of both YouTube's ad-supported tier, with more than 1.5 billion monthly users, as well as Google search's ability to surface free music with minimal effort

Related: Metallica Manager: YouTube is "the Devil"
Study Claims That YouTube Avoids $1 Billion in Music Royalties Using DMCA Safe Harbor
All Your Bass are Belong to Us: Soundcloud Fans Raid Site for Music Amid Fears of Total Collapse


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @06:52PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @06:52PM (#545912)

    Scoot back in time about a century. How did you get music? You went to a hall, or maybe a barbershop, or a friend's house, or wherever and someone played music. Music was a venue with a live delivered skill.

    Around about that time, fixed media were gaining currency. By fifty years ago, the record was the way you generally got music (although live play never went away). That has only progressed.

    Now, while there are live concerts, the fact is that the very concept of making music is something that can be done alone, with (relatively) affordable gear, with a fixed media end product, or at least the data that would occupy the fixed media.

    The very same industry that spent untold marketing money persuading the world that 45s, and LPs, and cassettes, and CDs were all you needed for music, is now being undermined by customers who want music when and where they feel like it, and producers who can do it without any gatekeeping function short of their own talent and budget.

    We're one integrated shoutcast server product away from having utterly indie production through distribution as well as streaming. And the majors did it to themselves by changing the understanding of what music delivery is.

    To cap it all, we have people like Spotify, Pandora, Soundcloud and Youtube essentially telling everyone it's either free, or as near as dammit to free, and the world's entertainment budget is not expanding indefinitely...

    So y'all excuse me while I wipe away a single tear for Google's inability to turn themselves into a must-have delivery service for music.

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 28 2017, @07:21PM (5 children)

    Back in the day software cost money. Yeah there was a lot of piracy yet the publishers sold enough to profit from their businesses. Customers could expect tech support and regular upgrades.

    Nowadays everything and its brother is free. The users expect it to remain free. Yet the services are enormously expensive to operation. It is common that a startup company burns up its VC without figuring out a way to earn money. Sometimes their monetization strategies drive users away, as with Twitter.

    Most get the idea to monetize their free services by publishing advertisements. But there are too many websites now, because everyone and his brother heard that you could earn coin by publishing some manner of content along with advertising. I once did - I earned a lot of money from ads on one of my articles.

    Users are only willing to click on a very limited number of ads. This leads the ads to compete with each other, so we get increasingly shrill and intrusive ads. The result is that users employ ad blockers, as I do now.

    A great many ad clicks are fraudulent.

    The web is a house of cards. Unless an effective way can be found to charge money for online services, this house of cards will collapse.

    Many startups burn VC banknotes to heat their offices in the winter.

    Please note that I'm wearing an FSF T-Shirt as I write this. Even Richard Stallman says it's OK to sell Free Software.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Geezer on Friday July 28 2017, @07:46PM

      by Geezer (511) on Friday July 28 2017, @07:46PM (#545948)

      You make a lot of excellent points, but I respectfully submit that as long as **advertising** exists, the web will exist, even if it's just a TCP/IP version of QVC or HSN.

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:11AM (2 children)

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:11AM (#546105) Journal

      *Copies* are free. Technology giveth, and then it taketh. It is thanks to technology that it even became possible to record art for playback later. It was this delicate balance of copying of recordings being possible but not particularly easy or inexpensive to do well that made the 20th century entertainment industry possible.

      Now copying is so easy it belongs to the masses. The days of charging per copy are ending. The corporate bookstore could compete with the public library by stocking many copies of recent stuff that libraries were slow to acquire. It can't compete with the Internet.

      It is still possible to make a living from art, through patronage, as well as advertising, endorsements, and live performances. But control of the means to copy, in order to impose fees, is no longer realistic. Big Media needs to get over it, stop with the propaganda that tries to equate copying with stealing, stop crying about piracy, and move on.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:03AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:03AM (#546148)

        I'm with you, although I would emphasise that they specifically went out of their way to generate the mindset that is undermining them right now.

        If all you need for music is a thing, or a pipe, then as long as anyone can easily produce that thing or pipe, your middlemen and gatekeepers are on very, very thin ice. What do they have? Marketing and distribution expertise. But for them to build on that distribution capability, they had to convince people that the thing or pipe was what they needed.

        In a way, they laid the table for the world to eat their lunch. And that's very sad. For them.

        The weird part is that there's a huge opening for expert critics. There's such a flood of crap, that intelligent direction to good stuff is worth it.

    • (Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:11AM

      by pnkwarhall (4558) on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:11AM (#546106)

      The web is a house of cards. Unless an effective way can be found to charge money for online services, this house of cards will collapse.

      I thought this was worth emphasizing. It's all about incentives, baby.

      --
      Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven