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Business News Digital
YouTube Music Key launch further delayed
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 3 June 2015
The official launch of YouTube’s long-in-beta Music Key streaming service has been delayed until September. But don’t go around telling people that the whole project is a disaster that’s going to be quietly shut down before ever going properly live, because that wouldn’t be true. Not true I tell you. Not true at all.
“We’re still going through some development”, said YouTube’s Head Of Content And Business Operations Robert Kyncl in a video conference earlier this week, according to The Guardian. “The launch is coming in a few months from here: there’s a little bit of a delay, but nothing too serious”.
Launched in beta last year, the paid-for music streaming platform has seen “tremendous engagement”, the Google-owned company said in April when announcing plans to expand an ad-removing subscription option to the rest of the video site. However, the firm recently said that Music Key’s beta period was being extended to at least 15 Sep – and Kyncl was even more cautious this week, saying: “I can’t promise the date. It’s already going a little too far even saying ‘a few months'”.
“We have been collecting a lot of feedback and working with [YouTube Music Key]”, Kyncl explained. “We got a lot of really great feedback [from early users], and thought it was better to address most of it than to launch without [addressing] it … We’re a lot smarter about the product from the heaviest users”.
He also seemed to say that the YouTube-wide subscription offer would replace the individual channel subscription system that was made available to some channels on the site in 2013, but which hasn’t been especially successful.
“We have not been scaling [the channel subscription option]”, he admitted. “It’s there, it’s available for people to take advantage of, but we have not been actively scaling it. We are focusing on the one subscription that we have discussed earlier and making sure that we roll that out … We just can’t do many different subscriptions, and do them well, and grow them large. So we’re focusing on one big effort today”.
