It was inevitable, wasn’t it? YouTube announced its subscription-based YouTube Red service last week, which will give users ad-free access to videos for $9.99 per month, starting today (Oct. 28).
A bonus—users will be able to cache the media they want in order to watch anytime, online or off.
Here’s a video explaining the whole thing:
Music Business Worldwide has a detailed list of why this could be a Really Big Deal for the industry. Give it a read. Also consider:
- A YouTube Red subscription will include access to Google’s streaming service, Google Play Music. That seems to be a pretty solid two-fer offer.
- Just as Apple Music is bundled into iOS, you can put money on YouTube Red being bundled into Android.
- If just 10% of YouTube users sign up, that will give YouTube Red five times the subscriber base of Spotify (100 million vs. 20 million). That’s also way bigger than the subscriber numbers for Apple Music.
- There will be much whingeing about the payouts to rights holders. Watch.
And here’s some stats, just for fun, from Tubular via Digital Music News:
- There are roughly 1.1 billion videos on YouTube.
- There are roughly 7.8 trillion all-time views.
- Of the 1.1 billion videos, just 5.3 percent (roughly 58.6 million) of videos on YouTube have 10,000 views or more.
- These videos have generated a cumulative 7.4 trillion views, or about 95% of all views.
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