Does anybody remember last year when Google/YouTube went up against the likes of Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, Rhapsody and the ilk releasing their own form of paid streaming service entitled YouTube Music Key?
Perhaps not, it was a somewhat flop compared to the existing dominators as it only really removed ads before listening to tracks, you still had to use the website itself and one had to fork over $7.99 per month, hardly seemed worth it. However, a group have discovered a way to make YouTube streaming a whole let better and guess what, you don’t need a subscription, which makes it completely free – look out major streaming services.
The new “sub-service” is named Streamus, which has basically turned YouTube Music Key into a fully-fledged streaming service through a simple Google Chrome (web browser) extension, as thenextweb (via A Journal Of Musical Things).
Basically, Streamus appears as a simple popup in your Google Chrome browser and is super easy to use. Explained perfectly by thenextweb, “The extension is built with Google’s Material design language and allows you to search any song on YouTube right inside a popup, add it to a playlist and listen instantly without needing to have a YouTube tab open.”
In addition to this, they’ve added extra functions including a radio service that can find similar sounding songs to broaden your horizons as well as the ability to create sharable playlists so you can force your great tastes onto all of your pals.
This stands as a potential threat to the major streaming services such as Spotify, with the ability to search through the massive amount of music sitting in YouTube archives for free, we could be looking a tiny little feature that may have a giant shake-up on the streaming service industry.
If we were to see the masses move from existing paid streaming subscriptions to Streamus, the heated debate of royalty payments to artists may reach fever-pitch, which ask the question, would artists see an even further decrease in royalty rates than what they’re currently experiencing?
These question marks currently hang above Streamus and one must remember, this is only the beginning, Google/YouTube may take action to remove the Chrome extension before it grows into something huge but for now if you want to check it out, click here.
