Present at the New Music Seminar in New York, YouTube’s global head of music, Lyor Cohen confirmed the ad-free YouTube Red and Google Play Music will merge into a new subscription service.
Cohen explained the two services need to be integrated with each other in order to educate customers and attract new subscribers.
Currently, Google’s video/music service ecosystem is confusing, not to mention fragmented. The company offers YouTube Red – a video service which takes ads out of the equation and allows users to save videos for later offline viewing.
Additionally, there the YouTube Music app which offers perks to Red subscribers and YouTube TV – a separate entity which is yet to widely available. Oh yeah and then there’s the Google Play Music which offers services similar to Spotify.
However, when all these services will be united under one umbrella, Google hopes the benefits of acquiring a subscription to the new service will become more evident to prospective customers.
Until then, Google says it will notify users all the disparate services about upcoming changes. However, Cohen has not provided an exact time frame for the rebrand. So it might be a while before we see the new service make a debut into the world.
