It Looks Like Google Will Shut Down Its Play Music Service
There are big changes coming to Google and YouTube’s music streaming services soon as the company tries to consolidate them all into one offering. According to a report at 9To5Google, Google will shut down its poorly titled Google Play Music streaming service and merge it into the new upcoming YouTube Remix service.
YouTube also has another service called YouTube Red, and you can see why the whole thing is so confusing. That’s why it’s such a good idea for there to be a single music offering coming from the entity. Of course, YouTube is owned by Google, a fact that most people know but can still be confusing to some. A single service would no doubt be much easier to deal with internally as well.
Play Music hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, and neither has YouTube Red, so getting a redo could be exactly what Google needs. Its deep pockets makes it a sleeping giant in music streaming, and since so many people use YouTube to play or discover music, there’s a built in user group.
The problem is that the company hasn’t been able to capitalize on this group so far. YouTube users are used to getting their content for free, so turning them into paying customers has been much more difficult than initially believed. Despite an aggressive sales campaign on YouTube, so few have signed on to its Red service that the actual numbers have never been reported.
A $9.99 monthly subscription currently provides access to Play Music’s library of 40 million songs, as well as an ad-free video playback experience on YouTube. That said, there’s been no hint of what the Remix will cost, although most believe that the price will still be around the $10 mark.
As with Apple and Amazon, music is an extremely small part of Google’s strategy and bottom line, but it does have the money required to create a service that will finally compete with Spotify. The question is, will the public care?
