Let’s hope this push to get people to upgrade their YouTube Music account means that Google won’t kill it.
Who are we kidding, Google will still kill YouTube Music in a few years. Look at what happened with Google Play Music.
Google is now showing a prominent “Upgrade” tab at the bottom of the YouTube Music app, to those that don’t pay for the service. It really wants you to pay to use YouTube Music, instead of sticking to the ad-supported model which is free.
When you tap on the tab, it does show you the price which is $9.99/month after a one-month free trial. As well as other features that are included with YouTube Music. Which includes the ability to download music, an ad-free experience and much more. It’s also worth noting that it is the same price as Spotify and Apple Music’s premium offerings.
This new tab pushes the library over, and messes with muscle memory
The reason why this is such a big deal, is because the library used to be in the lower-right hand corner. Now that is the upgrade tab. So now you are going to have to retrain yourself to move your finger over a little bit to tap on Library. Compared to where it used to be.
On the bright side, this is a bit more subtle than the prompts for YouTube Premium, every time you open YouTube on a new device (and sometimes more often then that). Where it’s an entire pop up that covers the whole screen.
But basically, Google would rather you pay them $9.99/month than rely on the money they’ll make from you with ads. Which seems to be a trend with Google lately. Forcing users to pay for more products that were offset with ad revenue. Like storage for Gmail, Google Photos and Drive.