YouTube to unveil video (and music?) plans on Wednesday

YouTube announced that it will be hosting an event this Wednesday in Los Angeles to formally introduce details about its long-rumored paid video service. Google has been slowly moving toward this shift for months, and the event this week could reveal the culmination of its efforts to create both a more lucrative Netflix- or Hulu-style paid subscription and a formal music streaming platform. Continue Reading

Mark Mulligan: Why It Is Time To Make YouTube Look Less Like Spotify And More Like Pandora

by Mark Mulligan

Midia Research founder Mark Mulligan analyzes the “freemium” space by comparing YouTube (and its new Music Key subscription service) to Spotify and Pandora. YouTube has changed from a marketing tool to a full-fledged listening destination, the author asserts, and should be modeled more like Pandora than Spotify. Continue Reading

Music Key update: launch delay, and All Access bundling

In an initiative marked by repeated long delays, it is perhaps unsurprising that Music Key, YouTube’s new music subscription service which was supposed to start today, has been pushed back to tomorrow. In other Music Key news, it is widely reported that a rumored subscriber connection between Music Key and Google’s audio-only subscription service, All Access, will indeed happen. Continue Reading