October marks the first anniversary of the dying of Google Play Music, leaving solely the sad shadow of a selected music service, YouTube Music, in Google’s ecosystem. YouTube Music is exhibiting merely how far behind the streaming music wars it is with the announcement of a model new operate: background music playback. Beforehand, having good with a streaming monitor on the ad-supported YouTube Music app would solely work for a lot of who had the app open—navigating to a minimal of 1 drawback else in your cellphone would stop the music. Now, 5 years after the service’s launch and one yr after the shutdown of Google Play Music, it’s best to income from YouTube Music like—precisely—a music app with out paying for YouTube Premium.
One closing ingredient: this terribly elementary operate is barely rolling out to Canada subsequent month. For now, all of us else nonetheless cannot use YouTube Music like a day-after-day streaming music app with out paying for the service. Google says that free background playback will most probably be accessible inside the market to “listeners far and broad on the planet” in the long term, nonetheless it hasn’t talked about when.
SoundCloud and Spotify current free background streaming—as did Google Play Music earlier than it was shut down—nonetheless YouTube Music hasn’t been ready to repeat that operate for the earlier 5 years. Subscribers to the $9.99 YouTube Music Premium have been in a position to play music contained contained in the background, and the operate is accessible for music it’s best to have uploaded your self. Nonetheless for a lot of who’ve been listening to the ad-supported streaming catalog, the music merely stopped contained contained in the background.
The free tier of YouTube moreover limits background playback, and YouTube Music’s tangled connection to YouTube is our best guess for why YouTube Music has been so sluggish to undertake this operate. YouTube’s music deal presumably hasn’t allowed for background playback with out paying further, and since music provides are negotiated by nation, it’s intelligent {{{{{{that a}}}}}} YouTube Music renegotiation would roll out on a country-by-country basis, with Canada being first.
