October marks the primary anniversary of the dying of Google Play Music, leaving solely the unhappy shadow of a special music service, YouTube Music, in Google’s ecosystem. YouTube Music is exhibiting merely how far behind the streaming music wars it’s with the announcement of a mannequin new function: background music playback. Beforehand, having enjoyable 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 no less than one issue else in your cellphone would cease the music. Now, 5 years after the service’s launch and one yr after the shutdown of Google Play Music, you have to benefit from YouTube Music like—accurately—a music app with out paying for YouTube Premium.
One final ingredient: this terribly elementary function is barely rolling out to Canada subsequent month. For now, everybody else nonetheless can’t use YouTube Music like a day-after-day streaming music app with out paying for the service. Google says that free background playback will probably be available on the market to “listeners all over the place on the planet” in the long run, nonetheless it hasn’t talked about when.
SoundCloud and Spotify present free background streaming—as did Google Play Music earlier than it was shut down—nonetheless YouTube Music hasn’t been in a position to replicate that function for the sooner 5 years. Subscribers to the $9.99 YouTube Music Premium have been in a position to play music contained in the background, and the function is accessible for music you should have uploaded your self. Nonetheless for a lot of who’ve been listening to the ad-supported streaming catalog, the music merely stopped contained in the background.
The free tier of YouTube furthermore limits background playback, and YouTube Music’s tangled connection to YouTube is our greatest guess for why YouTube Music has been so sluggish to undertake this function. YouTube’s music deal presumably hasn’t allowed for background playback with out paying extra, and since music offers are negotiated by nation, it is clever {{{that a}}} YouTube Music renegotiation would roll out on a country-by-country foundation, with Canada being first.
