Billboard is reporting that YouTube is preparing to launch a streaming music service some time next year.
YouTube is preparing a premium on-demand music service — akin to a Spotify, but with video — to launch later this year, according to several sources familiar with the plans.
Given that the platform does dominate a large space in the music world online, we can’t see this being anything but good for consumers (in theory). We’ll start to worry if YouTube then starts locking some otherwise free content behind a paywall, but the upside is that this means they’ll have access to other stuff they wouldn’t be able to host before given the rights management issues. We’ll have more on this as it becomes available.
