Youtube Streaming Music Service to Come Soon?
There’s already a host of streaming music services available, like Spotify or Pandora, but soon there may be another, created by the most powerful company in the world.
Fortune reported today that “Youtube…will launch a subscription music service later this year.” This information was provided to Forbes by an unnamed source, and Google declined to comment, perhaps testing the waters with their ambitious idea.
The company, which owns Youtube, already has a content delivery network for downloadable content. This service, Google Play, allows users to purchase music, but does not allow anyone to stream without first paying for the song. Many people already use Google’s Youtube to stream music, but the additional streaming of video is expensive for both Google and its users. To put this in perspective, take into account Youtube’s statistics page, which claims that 72 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube each minute. This video is analyzed against 500,000 of copyrighted material (much of which is music), resulting in a total of 200,000,000 videos which have had some sort of copyrighted material in them. Many of these videos were taken down as a result. Being able to stream this, provide royalties for the studios, and reduce the bandwidth, would be a perfect solution to the problem.
In addition, a free streaming music service would allow Google to do what it does best: sell ads. Currently the company sells ad space on webpages, their search results, and before clips on Youtube. This addition would allow them to provide ad space for streaming audio ads, a target medium that Google has no access to.
All this comes shortly after Google unveiled its Glass project, which integrates a small computer into a wearable eyepiece. As it is able to access the internet, any future iterations of the project would allow the users to constantly stream music from their sunglasses. If that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is. Let’s hear it for the Nerds!
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