For a while now, Android news has been abuzz with rumors of Google entering the Music Streaming game, with some sort of subscription service attached to it. This wouldn’t be the first time that Google had made an entry into the world of digital music of course, Google Music is a big thing and for some people the sole way to access and listen to their music libraries. Since it launched in the UK last year, it’s become my de facto manner for listening to my music. Google have a couple of ways in which they could roll out such a service, they could bolt it on to the side of Google Music or, they could use the biggest music discovery outlet in the world. YouTube.
In the last five years or so, YouTube has fast become one of the biggest music discovery outlets in the world. The radio isn’t completely dead in a lot of places but, how much “new music” do you pick up through listening to the radio, that’s dominated by big names that are always in the charts? Not a lot of it, I’d bet. YouTube is a brilliant place for new artists to show off their work, and for fans to listen to their music legally and from every device they own. Thanks to VEVO’s massive presence on YouTube, watching music videos and listening to new and old music alike is really easy.
Fortune has spoken to people that must be “familiar with the matter” and the word is that YouTube could be entering the fray for Google. There’s an interesting quote that comes out of YouTube when Fortune reached out to them, it’s nothing too surprising and doesn’t necessarily mean such a service is coming but, it could be the start of it all:
“While we don’t comment on rumor or speculation, there are some content creators that think they would benefit from a subscription revenue stream in addition to ads, so we’re looking at that.”
YouTube would be a perfect candidate for this as it’s already a big player in the music world. It might not seem like it, with services like Spotify hitting around 1 Million subscribers but, people flock to YouTube to check out the latest music and they’re are talents born on the network these days. If YouTube were to launch such a service, I’d say it’d be a hit but, they’d need to tone down their ad attacks.