The new service will launch on 28th October and will allow subscribers to watch all videos across YouTube without adverts, as well as offering offline playback. Your £9.99/month will let you access the service on any device you sign into YouTube and will eventually offer a dedicated YouTube Music app.
YouTube Music will come with unlimited access to Google Play Music, including the download store and cloud storage as well and promises to help you discover, watch and listen to more music than ever before.
A nifty new feature of the service will let you start playing a song or video through the app and then switch to a completely different one, while the audio still plays in the background. Currently, if you were to switch out of YouTube to another app, the song or video would stop playing.
YouTube has said original content from “some of YouTube’s biggest creators” will arrive “early next year”, and this will only be available for subscribers.
YouTube Red launches on 28th October for £9.99/month on Android devices, or £12.99 on iOS devices, as Apple commands 30 per cent of all subscription prices of apps in its App Store. The free, ad-supported version of the popular video site will still remain.
If YouTube Red becomes popular with users, it could quickly become the service with the most subscribers. YouTube currently has over one billion unique users a month, so if just ten per cent sign up, it would mean 100 million paying subscribers. Compare this with Spotify’s estimated 20 million and Apple Music’s recently announced 6.5 million and it’s easy to see why YouTube has entered the subscription service market.
