Well this is interesting. We’ve been hearing for months now, actually closer to a year, that YouTube was working on a subscription music service. Which was a bit confusing and we thought it might be redundant since the company already has a subscription music service, Google Play Music All Access. But then again having YouTube as a subscription music service makes a bit more sense as its something that more people know about. And a lot of people already use YouTube for their music, so it kinda makes sense right?
However, it appears that YouTube has another set back. This time it’s to do with their head of music, who has left the company. This is the second time in a year that Google has lost a head of music in the YouTube project, according to the WSJ.
“Chris LaRosa, YouTube’s product manager in charge of music, will be leaving Google this Friday to join a startup. A YouTube spokesman confirmed LaRosa’s departure but didn’t say which startup LaRosa would be joining.”
We’re also hearing that the delays with the subscription music service is due to YouTube and record labels disagreeing on things. Actually they are disagreeing on just about everything.
“Those delays have resulted from internal arguments about how the service should be designed, including what features YouTube should charge users for and how the service should be integrated with the rest of YouTube.”
When Google finally does launch their subscription music service for YouTube, it’s going to compete with the likes of Spotify, where it’ll offer ad-free music, as well as limited offline listening. There are plenty of other streaming music services out there already, so it’ll be interesting to see what Google and YouTube does to make this one a bit more different from the others that are available.