As streaming music grows in popularity, its only a matter of time before Google jumps in the ring with their own service. With YouTube as a content source, a streaming service woven into Google Play would likely prove incredibly popular.
If you’ve ever used YouTube for more than a couple of minutes, you’re pretty familiar with the playlists feature. It’s a great way of organizing related content, and works well for all kinds of users. One group in particular takes advantage of this service in a fairly unique way — as an unlimited free music streaming service. YouTube is home to just about every popular music video that has been made in the last decade, as well as a great source for indy recording sessions and new artists.
For music lovers on a budget, YouTube is already a pretty sweet streaming music service. Its popularity guarantees that it is available on almost everything, and the service is already designed to offer you higher or lower quality audio based on your Internet connection. The only thing that would make the service better would be if you could just remove the video altogether and listen to the audio in the background like any other Internet radio or streaming audio service.
It’s no secret that Google has been seriously considering subscription models that can be injected into YouTube. The idea works well, especially when you consider the volume of high quality content already being streamed on the service. Why shouldn’t the teams behind Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, H+ The Digital Series, or even full on television shows be able to charge for content on YouTube?
When you think about how many times the first episode of The Newsroom was watched on YouTube as part of an HBO hook to watch the show, and then consider how many people would have gladly paid to watch the rest of the show through YouTube, it starts to make more sense. If you apply that same concept to music streaming, Google could quickly turn a pretty popular social concept into a moneymaker overnight by allowing their content producers the ability to stream just audio. With what on the surface seems like pretty small changes, Google would have a streaming audio service overnight, and have it possibly filled with more content than most of the competing services.
The benefit that YouTube has over the other streaming audio services is what it can offer on top of just streaming the song. You could be listening to a song, tap the screen to see the music video, or be sent to Google Play to purchase the track or album. Google could use their partnership with ContentID so that you can add a song to your streaming playlist just by asking Google Now what song is playing on the radio.
There’s a lot of flexibility here, and the end result is all good for Google. The added information from the streaming service would give them more data to better target ads to you when you are using YouTube to watch other content. If a song is playing in the background of a video you are watching, YouTube could prompt you to add it to your playlist after the video has ended. There’s more than a few opportunities here.
Since Google isn’t usually willing to comment on whether or not they are going to do something in the future, most of what we are seeing here are just rumors. It’s not hard to see how Google could be planning something like this, and if they do release a streaming music service it would have the potential to be pretty disruptive.
No comments:
Post a Comment