YouTube is launching its streaming music feature in beta form. Complete with background listening, cacheable video, ad-free music and a free 6 months trial, YouTube is becoming a little music player to those that love YouTube.
Called the Music Key, it's essentially a music player. When starting it, users can start a video that will keep playing even if the user close out the app. While it plays, the app will give a little music-control widget to the mobile device's app drawer.
The ad-free service allows users to download any contents they see fit, and can also cache videos/musics to watch them later.
What YouTube did is to make mobile YouTube users' experience similar to those on PCs. Users can also make playlists, or listen to other people's playlists. When the video the user is listening comes to an end, the user need to go back to the app to find the next one.
Music Key provides a "Music" tab in the app's home screen. Here, users can find a mix of things they've been searching for in recent times, along with an endless list of other suggestion YouTube things the user will like.
The suggestions are based on the user's watch history, channels they've subscribed to, Google Play Music suggestions, popular videos, top videos by genre, and some assorted curated playlists.
What makes Music Key different from most other music listening app is that users can still listen to what they're listening to even with the screen off. And the best of all, to some people of course, no ads.
YouTube's Music Key in beta form is only rolling out to a selected number of users. Google said that those who listen a lot of music on YouTube, and those that are already subscribed to Google Play Music All Access are signed up automatically.
And those that subscribed to Music Key will also be subscribed to Google Play All Access automatically.
After the 6-months trial ends, users need to pay a discounted $8 a month to continue using the service.
Music Key is putting YouTube in a direct competition with other similar services such as Spotify, Beats and Amazon. But with YouTube is supported by Google and all of its services, it's quickly a powerful opponent if considering it an alternative.