courtesy YouTube
Taylor Swift is playing on a streaming service. Sort of. I’m getting a demo of YouTube’s new music offering and the first thing I ask to hear is pop’s current reigning queen. (Until Beyoncé stealth-drops a new album, at least.) Within seconds, “Shake It Off” is playing.
This is a glimpse at YouTube Music Key, a streaming music service that’s hoping to bring some new competition to existing offerings like Rdio or Spotify (which has been in the crosshairs since Swift swiftly removed her music from the service two weeks ago). By harnessing all the music on the site—and the deals YouTube made with artists and labels to get/keep it there—Music Key takes the habit we all already have of pulling up YouTube clips when we want to hear songs and turns it into a music player that’s ready to go on your desktop or mobile device, even if you’re offline.
“Taylor’s videos have been successful on YouTube—she has over nine million subscribers on the platform, making her one of our most subscribed musicians,” YouTube’s director of music partnerships Christophe Muller says while discussing YouTube’s new music streaming features, which the company announced today. “So we’re working hard to have more ways for her and all the other musicians to have their music discovered and to earn more revenue.”
Of course, what you can hear from Swift’s new album 1989 is only the music she’s made available, which at the moment is only “Shake It Off” and the instantly-viral video released this week for “Blank Space”—but that’s still more than other streaming services. And since it’s on YouTube, fans of Swift—or fans of any particular artist— can follow up “Shake It Off” with, say, the outtakes from the song’s video shoot or music from complete unknowns recording covers, doing remixes, or making similar tunes. (Remember, not too long ago even Justin Bieber was just a kid uploading his own clips to the site.)
YouTube’s new music offerings work both in web browswers and mobile apps (it’s coming to Android first). The mobile version has two tiers: A free ad-supported service for streaming playlists, and Music Key, a premium offering that’s $7.99 per month for beta users but will be eventually go up to $9.99 per month. Although the free version will require users to hear/watch the occasional ad, just like YouTube users currently do, Music Key removes them, and additionally gives mobile users something they’ve wanted for a long time: the ability to keep YouTube playlists running in the background while they use other apps or have their screen locked. It also allows them to download playlists for use offline. (Hello, airplane mode!)
courtesy YouTube
The beta will go to a group of heavy music listeners on YouTube, Muller says, and is primarily focused on getting user feedback. One of those pieces of feedback the company is looking for is what does and doesn’t qualify as music. Songs from artist pages qualify, obviously, but what about a crummy karaoke version of their songs? An artist discussing their cat on a late-night talk show—is that music? YouTube is hoping users will let the company know what needs to be in Music Key.
“You didn’t just watch ‘All About That Bass’ 200+ million times on YouTube,” the company wrote in a blog post today announcing the service. “You watched Meghan Trainor perform it live for the first time ever, and later with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots. You used the song in tens of thousands of your videos, like covering it with an upright bass. Your views helped put the song at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks.”
As for having the non-hits, YouTube is working on those as well, securing high-quality deep cuts (aka non-singles) from record labels—currently all the majors like Universal and Sony and hundreds of indie labels—for use on the service as well. There’s also the possibility that music uploaded in fan videos and monetized by YouTube’s Content ID could show up in Music Key playlists as well. Oh, and Music Key subscribers also get subscriptions to Google Play Music, so there’s that.
So, will this be better for artists than other streaming music services? Maybe. YouTube’s Muller was reluctant to give out specifics about what the payouts would be for tracks streamed through their new service and whether or not they would be better than, say, the $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream Spotify pays to rights holders. He does, however, note that having money coming in from ad-supported videos and subscription fees adds a revenue stream.
Or, at least, hopefully it will. Mark Mulligan, an analyst for Midia Research in the UK, noted in a blog post that “just seven percent of consumers say they would pay for a YouTube subscription service without ads and including extra content … but 25 percent say they will never pay for a subscription service because they get all the music they need for free from YouTube. The net balance is clearly negative.”
After Swift pulled her music from Spotify, she told Yahoo Music she felt the service felt like an experiment, “and I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music.” (Others agreed.) Scott Borchetta, the president of her label Big Machine Label Group, went on to say in a radio interview they didn’t want to be disrespectful to superfans who paid for the record and then heard from their friends “‘Why did you pay for it? It’s free on Spotify.'” Swift seems more amenable to YouTube, she did premiere “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” on the site, after all. And perhaps other artists who’ve gotten huge buzz from videos—like Nicki Minaj did with the 293-million-views-and-counting “Anaconda” video—will also see benefits.
“If YouTube can fully harness its rich set of non-core catalogue assets, such as live concert streams, artist hangouts, YouTube sessions etc. then Music Key has the potential to be the most compelling music subscription offer yet,” Mulligan concluded in his blog post. “But YouTube’s innovation has never been the problem, it is its impact on the wider market that matters most.”
So hopefully this is a music experiment fans and artists can get behind.
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