YouTube Music, YouTube Music Premium, YouTube Premium have been launched in India. With the launch, India’s music and video streaming space is becoming more and more crowded and now comprises of several home-grown services as well as all major global providers.
YouTube Music and YouTube Premium are connected with Google Play Music and Google Play Movies services which are already available in the market and will be taking on a mass of rival streaming platforms in the country.
YouTube Music will be available both as a separate mobile app and a Web-based desktop interface that is aimed for music streaming. The service offers original songs, albums, numerous playlists, and artist radio as well as YouTube’s own list of remixes, covers, music videos and live performances.
YouTube Music subscription plan, offers
Like most other music streaming services in the market, Youtube is offering two types of the service — YouTube Music is available free of cost but is ad supported and YouTube Music Premium is paid and ad free. And finally the feature we’ve all been waiting for- to play songs and videos in the background while doing other things on the smartphones is available for YouTube Music Premium subscription users but this feature is not available in standard YouTube experience. Moreover, the paid subscribers will also get the benefit of downloads to stream when offline.
YouTube Music Premium subscription has been rated starting at Rs. 99 a month. For the users who have never previously tried or used any of YouTube or Google’s music streaming services, there is apreliminary offer of three months free subscription for YouTube Music Premium.Youtube has come up with a family plan at Rs. 149 a month that can be shared among a total of six family members. Both the single user plan and the family plan have a one month trial period.
The company is hoping to build on the back of the already massive YouTube following in the country, which frequently uses the streaming service to listen to music. India’s love for music comes as no surprise for the company. T-Series is a music label and movie production house from the country which almost overtook the biggest YouTuber- PewDiePie in terms of highest subscribers. T-Series’ YouTube channel mainly focuses on movie trailers and music videos. India is where the multi-lingual music section flourishes. It’s interesting to note how Indian artists have steadily claimed top spots in the Global YouTube Top Artists chart.
YouTube also says that the paid subscribers of Google Play Music will automatically get admission to YouTube Music Premium and they don’t need to pay anything extra for the same. The YouTube Music app is available for both iOS and Android platforms and can be downloaded from the app stores of the respective platforms.
YouTube Premium is not really a competitor to any of the video streaming services like Netflix or Prime Video, given the limited catalogue of the original content on this service and will only look enticing to the consumers who want to enhance their YouTube watching experience with background playback and ad-free, more than getting any extra content.
YouTube Music will be going one-on-one with similar music streaming apps like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, JioSaavn, and Gaana in the country. Almost all of these services have paid plans starting Rs. 99, except Amazon Music.