We tend to think of the ‘radio’ features of streaming music as being lean-back listening governed by the DSPs’ recommendation algorithms. The post YouTube Music now lets listeners create their own radio stations appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

A group of workers involved in YouTube Music’s content operations have begun a strike. The staff are subcontractors for the music service. The post YouTube Music workers strike over return-to-office policy appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Want to get first dibs on brand new features on YouTube Music? Apologies, you’re already too late: applications closed this weekend. The post YouTube Music to test new features in ‘Listening Room’ program appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

At the end of 2021 there were 523 million users of paid music streaming subscriptions. The post Report: global music subscribers grew to 616.2m in Q2 2022 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

With Spotify’s annual Wrapped promotion imminent, three other streaming services launched their recap features for listeners yesterday. The post Apple Music, YouTube Music and Deezer launch their annual recaps appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

It’s more than a year since YouTube announced that it had 50 million paid subscribers for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. The post YouTube now has 80m paid Music and Premium subscribers appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The topic of unionised workers within and around the music industry is growing in prominence, with two more stories to add to the trend. The post Unionisation afoot for YouTube and Netflix music workers appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

YouTube paid out $6bn to the music industry in the 12-month period between July 2021 and June 2022, the company has announced. The post YouTube’s annual music industry payouts grow to $6bn appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

In mid-2018, YouTube said that more than one billion people visited it every month to consume music. Two and a half years later, that total has doubled to more than two billion. The new milestone has been announced this afternoon in a blog post by YouTube’s global head of music Lyor Cohen, as YouTube launched […]

YouTube’s parent company Alphabet reported another big quarter yesterday. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the advertising market, Alphabet’s Q3 revenues were up by 14% year-on-year to $46.17bn, helping the company to an $11.25bn net profit in the third quarter. Within that, there were figures for YouTube advertising revenues, which grew by 32.4% year-on-year to $5.04bn […]

YouTube Music’s #SOSFest last weekend has so far raised more than $1.8m to support NIVA’s campaign to support independent music venues in the US. The company is already planning its next online festival though: it’s called #FoundryFest, and will be an “on-demand video series” rather than a full-on livestreamed event. It’s focusing on artists who […]

Spotify launched its Daily Mix playlists in 2016 as a collection of personalised playlists based on different ‘clusters’ of a listener’s musical tastes. Now it looks like YouTube Music is launching a similar feature. Tech blog Android Police reported on some users seeing up to seven new ‘My Mix’ playlists, each seemingly based on a different genre or […]

Can you make money from livestreamed music performances on YouTube? Japanese artist Reol certainly did: to the tune of $130k. YouTube’s director of Black music and culture Tuma Basa revealed the figure in his appearance at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference yesterday alongside colleague T. Jay Fowler, director of product management. Reol’s livestream […]

The Music Managers Forum (MMF) is teaming up with YouTube Music once again for its Accelerator Programme for Music Managers in the UK. Applications open today for the scheme’s 2021 cohort, which will be its third year. It’ll offer 12-month grants of up to £15k as well as training and other support. The MMF has […]

As it prepares for a migration of users from Google Play Music, YouTube Music’s team have been talking about some of their recent improvements to playlists on the service. That includes assistive playlists, with YouTube suggesting songs to add to a playlist based on its title, the songs already in the playlist, and the user’s listening history. […]

As long goodbyes go, Google Play Music’s has been LONG. It was July 2017 when YouTube’s global head of music Lyor Cohen first revealed plans to merge Google’s music streaming (and cloud locker) service with YouTube’s equivalent – then called YouTube Red, but since rebranded as YouTube Music. Nearly three years later, in May 2020, YouTube […]

In February this year we wrote about Amplify London, a new partnership between YouTube Music and UK charity London Music Fund to support grassroots projects for young musicians. Now the first five projects to benefit have been announced, which will reach up to 200 11-21 year-olds across London in the UK. The projects include: a […]

There were 341 million people using paid music subscriptions at the end of 2019, according to global music industry body the IFPI. Now we’ve got an update on that figure, albeit from a different source. Consultancy firm Midia Research has published its music subscriber market share figures for Q1 2020, claiming that by the end of March […]

A decent suite of personalised playlists is now table stakes for anyone who wants to be a competitive music-streaming service. YouTube Music’s latest move to ensure it’s up to speed is the launch of three new ‘playlists mixed for you’ which follow the template laid down by other services. Discover Mix is a playlist of […]

Christmas is coming, and Music Ally’s list of cheap music-streaming subscription promotions is getting fat. YouTube is the latest in to the festive fray, with a ‘Cyber Week’ offer in the US of an extended three-month free trial of its YouTube Premium tier, rather than the usual one month of free access. That includes YouTube […]

The transition continues from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. Google has announced that the latter app will now be pre-installed on all devices running the latest versions of its Android operating system. That’s Android 9 and Android 10, to be specific. For now, this is likely to to be something of a niche: as a guide, Google’s […]

YouTube is making a change to the way it calculates its YouTube Music charts, and its ’24-hour debut’ records. From now on, paid advertising views will not count towards either. The change follows a recent controversy when Sony Music India claimed that artist Badshah had broken YouTube’s 24-hour-debut record, before it emerged that paid ads […]

App-analytics firm SensorTower has been casting its eye over the music world again: publishing its estimates for the most-downloaded music apps globally in July. Its stats come from analysis of Apple and Google’s app stores, although not other third-party Android app stores (notably in China, where those stores are extremely popular). Spotify tops the chart covering overall […]

The summer holidays are just a couple of weeks in here in the UK where Music Ally is written from, so seeing ‘back to school’ headlines from the US already is a strange experience. Part of that, though, is the upcoming start of another academic year for older students, and music-streaming services are joining the […]

YouTube’s latest improvement to its YouTube Music app focuses on the boundary between audio and video. Since launch, people have been able to choose to listen to audio-only versions of songs in YouTube Music, or watch their music videos. What’s new this week is the ability to flick between those two modes while listening/watching. “No […]

YouTube has launched a couple of new ways to advertise on its platform, which may be of use for artists or smaller labels who are lacking the time and resources for creating and editing video ads. One of them is called Bumper Machine, and it’s a tool for creating the six-second ‘bumper ads’ that YouTube says […]

Google hasn’t revealed how many paying subscribers its YouTube Music subscription service has, and it’s been a long time since we saw any numbers for its existing Google Play Music. Now Bloomberg has tried to plug that gap with a report mooting a number for the combined figure of both services. “Google’s paid music services have eclipsed […]

Reports earlier this week that Amazon was preparing to launch a free music-streaming tier for its Echo smart speakers sparked a drop in Spotify’s share price. So what effect will today’s news that YouTube Music is launching a ‘free, ad-supported experience’ for Google Home speakers have? In fact, YouTube Music’s free audio tier will work […]

The top bosses at YouTube, including CEO Susan Wojcicki and global head of music Lyor Cohen, are in India to mark the launch of YouTube Music there, announcing the app has been downloaded 3m times in its first week. (In comparison, Spotify said 1m people had signed up for the service during the first week […]

It’s no secret that streaming service Google Play Music will be shutting down, as its parent company concentrates its energy on YouTube Music. The process of phasing out the older service is stepping up, with the closure later this month of the Google Play Artist Hub. This was the way independent artists managed their profiles […]

Afrobeats artist Burna Boy is the latest musician to get a ‘YouTube Artist Spotlight Story’ produced by Google’s video service. He’s the first Nigerian artist to be chosen as an ‘artist on the rise’ by YouTube Music, to recognise the way he’s building an audience around the world with his videos. YouTube also provided some stats to […]