YouTube Music Is Here And It’s A Game Changer

Hey there, YouTuber’s who look up music videos like Taylor Swift music videos. I gotta tell you that YouTube Music is finally out yesterday. I downloaded mine on my IPad Mini and it was awesome. Go check it out if you haven’t.

Now, I’ll talk about why I think YouTube Music can rule all streaming services. So let’s check it out. Shall we?

Well then, as you may know that streaming music is an incredibly crowded field. There’s Apple Music, Spotify, and Pandora. There’s Rdio, Rhapsody, and Deezer. Amazon throws in a music streaming service when you sign up for Prime. But you know who’s really killing it with music, a company almost so obvious you wouldn’t even know it? YouTube.

Come to think of it. While Taylor Swift once readily pulled her music off of platforms like Spotify and Apple Music (at least, until Apple agreed to pay), she never made the same move on YouTube. It’s the same for other artists like Christina Aguilera, who often put up exclusive music content on the video service as a way to reach 1 billion-plus users at once. Compare that to Spotify’s 75 million users or Apple Music’s 15 million.

Plus, YouTube’s audience is unique. They love to engage. They watch, like, and share. They make remixes, covers, lyrics clips, and response videos. And they do this for everything that’s already part of the YouTube collection, including official music videos, fan videos, and concert footage.

Now, YouTube is taking this massive corpus, mixing in some neat new features, and opening it up to everyone as a standalone app with a clear focus on just the music. Today, the company is launching its first official standalone music app called, well, YouTube Music. “It’s all about high-reward, low-effort experiences,” T.Jay Fowler, head of music products at YouTube, tells Wired.

That’s right. I’m talking about YouTube Music. In fact, YouTube Music is a perfect tool for music veterans like Backstreet Boys because music veterans like Nelly Furtado would be perfect for YouTube Music allowing veterans to finally have the time to be popular in YouTube Music.

So enter YouTube Music. YouTube Music is the new king of music compared to Spotify and Apple Music. Remember when mainstream music really wish rock music is coming back. Well then, with YouTube Music, people will feel in love with rock music again. If only Metallica avoids streaming music. Duh.

"We do a lot of quality evaluations," T. Jay Fowler, head of music product development at YouTube, tells The Verge. "Because when someone uses your service and asks for a certain style of music, when they expect something to play, that is an important contract you have [to] fulfill."

Yesterday, Google officially unveiled YouTube Music for Android and iOS, the third YouTube app to be spun off from the main app, after YouTube Kids and YouTube Gaming. It also takes on another Google music streaming app, Google Play Music, and while it may not make sense for Google to have two apps with the same basic purpose, YouTube Music is nothing like Google Play Music.

Not only that, the Google-owned YouTube spinoff, which Google has been hyping for several weeks, is more than just a Spotify or Apple Music clone. In fact, YouTube Music is backed by YouTube's long history of being the most dominant music streaming service on the Internet for years, with Spotify and Pandora following by a long shot. Big time.

YouTube Music banks on the popularity of YouTube and offers access to the 30 million music videos — roughly around the same number of songs available on Spotify and Apple Music — in its repository to users who can play them as audio-only with the app running in the background, that is, if users have a $9.99 subscription to YouTube Red. It's simple and easy to use. As with other music apps, users can search for songs, artists or albums and play them.

However, with YouTube being the most popular video content sharing website in the world, YouTube Music also has access to a wide collection of other musical content, aside from the official music videos licensed by record labels. These include live concerts, song covers from lesser known artists and even instructional videos about, say, how to play a certain song on the piano. That's not something you can get from Spotify or Apple Music at the moment.

What is lacking from the service, however, is the user ability to create or share playlists, as Spotify and Apple Music users can. Instead, YouTube Music creates daily playlists based on the songs the user has listened to, the songs the user likes and the songs the app thinks the user will like. There's a "Love" button that tells the app what users like, and when they listen to a song, the playlist will automatically tweak itself to fit the user's tastes.

This is all done using Google's AI-powered machine learning system in conjunction with a small team of humans making sure the machine processes the selection of music properly. The machine takes advantage of the vast repository of playlists curated by YouTube's users over the years to learn what songs go together, while the human curators ensure the songs are woven tightly around the playlist. In essence, it combines Spotify's algorithm-based technology and Apple's human curation team to deliver better results.

Wow, this reminds me of something. I would like YouTube Music to include the tagging genres section. That way you can tag a specific song with a specific genre like tagging a Taylor Swift song with the genre pop. That would be sweet, OK then, let’s move on.

According to Wired, from day one, YouTube Music app is launching on IOS and Android in the US. As Sowmya Subramanian, an engineering director at YouTube explains, it’s the culmination of everything YouTube learned from launching Music Key, its beta music subscription service, last year. (That service had only ever been available to heavy music listeners identified by YouTube.)

In YouTube Music, everything is personalized. You start with a home screen, which has three elements: “My station” plus two genre stations—say, country and pop—that come up based on your listening patterns. Choose your personalized station, and that sends you off on what Fowler calls “an endless discovery journey.” The station is based on stuff you like, and what YouTube’s algorithm thinks you will like, based on how you’re browsing.

“It represents the entirety of your musical tastes,” Fowler says. You can dig deeper into the settings to tweak something called “variety.” Choose “less variety” to play more songs you’ve liked directly; “balanced” to get a mix of algorithmic and manual preferences; and “more variety” to let the machine go wild.

Once you’ve got a song playing, you’re taken into a view with two tabs: Playing Now, and Explore. Flip over to Explore, and YouTube’s algorithmic smarts stare you right in the face. The app combs through the huge pile of music in the entire YouTube collection and surfaces all related content, whether that’s a fan video of the song you’re currently listening to, a live concert, a lyrics video, remix, or cover by another artist—all labeled. Fowler says the app can do this by leveraging YouTube’s smart Content ID system—an automated system originally for identifying pirated copies on the site. It also has a “Melody ID” algorithm for songs, Fowler says.

For those hoping to keep up with music trends, YouTube Music includes a tab called Trending. The app serves up categories like “The Daily 40,” or “On the Rise,” culled from the larger YouTube community.

YouTube Red subscribers enjoy added bonuses. A clever toggle in the upper right corner lets users tell the app they’re not interested in watching video, and the frame instantly freezes on the screen, signaling an audio-only experience. That’s a godsend, Fowler says YouTube beta users told the team, because it lets you use YouTube in the car or while you’re out for a run, guilt-free—since you’re not burning all that video data. (Other benefits of a Red subscriber on YouTube Music include background play, ad-free watching and listening, and the ability to take your music offline.)

But the favorite feature of all is something called the offline mixtape. You determine how much of your phone’s data you’re willing to spare for songs, pick the audio quality, and let the app make you a playlist. It’s a lot like Spotify’s excellent Discover feature, except it’s refreshed daily, not weekly. The offline mixtape is another exclusive for YouTube Red subscribers.

"We do a lot of quality evaluations," T. Jay Fowler, head of music product development at YouTube, tells The Verge. "Because when someone uses your service and asks for a certain style of music, when they expect something to play, that is an important contract you have [to] fulfill."

For all the processes curation goes through, YouTube Music on the front end is extremely easy to use and intuitive. After installing the app, users will be automatically logged into their Google accounts, with all of the music videos they've ever watched on YouTube already loaded. The interface is sleek and simple, and it doesn't take long for users to figure out where to go.

YouTube Music is highly integrated with YouTube Red. Users who already have a subscription will be able to enjoy all the premium features of the new app, including listening to audio-only in the background and offline listening. Users can still listen for free, but without the backgrounding and, of course, with ads. It's a similar freemium business model that Spotify uses, which appears to be favorable to users but not to artists and record labels, who prefer Apple Music's subscription-only model. Cool. I like that. With the rise of streaming music, this will be a game changer for artists that otherwise unable to perform well in terms of poor marketing or sometimes that people got tired of like Avril Lavigne.

So how big a deal is YouTube Music in terms of the future of music? “It’s already enormous,” says Larry Miller, professor of music business at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. “YouTube is already the world’s largest on-demand streaming service by far,” Miller says. “In other words, put every other service in the world in a bathtub, and you won’t begin to fill the bottom with respect to the size of YouTube’s on-demand streaming service.” Conveniently, all the licenses—from record companies, music publishers, and even smaller, independent labels—are already in place on YouTube.

YouTube, for its part, says it wants to help the artist community, pointing out that any artist—at any stage in their music career—can upload a music video to YouTube and get exposure to a billion plus viewers. This app offers artists yet another avenue for making money—whether a cut from ads or subscription fees. And YouTube’s work on Music is hardly over.

“What we’re hearing from our partners and from the industry is that they’re very excited there’s a new experience coming to the market,” Fowler says. “This is our first product, but you’re going to see a lot more soon.”

Nice, I’m really exciting for YouTube Music. With YouTube Music dominates the music streaming service, this will allow poorly publicized music like rock music will change the future of music. So let’s say goodbye to repeats and radio and say hello to YouTube Music.

So what do you think? Do you like the new YouTube Music? Is YouTube Music the future of music? Do you think YouTube music can save longtime veterans like Jewel? Sound off below!