The wasted potential of “YouTube Music”
When I was younger, sometimes I had these idealistic technological day-dreams about how a better tech-world could look like.
One of them was about the perfect file format for music. Of course it would contain all the metadata like lyrics, BPM, or crowd-sourced genre information. While on pause it would display the cover art, while playing it would show the video (only on devices with screens that support it and only if there would be a video available).
The reason I’m thinking about this now is the recent shutdown of Grooveshark in Germany, which leaves a hole unfulfilled: Spotify, Rdio, or Simfy stream music to you as much as you want, but let’s face it, because of the costs of round about 10 €/month they shut out a lot of customers, which aren’t that music-savvy. Spotify offers a free version, but it’s also not available in Germany and it needs the desktop client.
Even if you could afford the money, a perfect solution looks slightly different. We already see labels withdrawing their music from streaming services due to low income. And if you would want to share a tune with a friend, you have to watch out if he/she has also a subscription on this specific service.
My hypothesis: YouTube is the best player in the field to fill this gap. They already have the reputation to be the best site to play music. Let me repeat: Even not intended by the YouTube founders, it became the 1st place young people go to when they want to play their favorite song on a party or even at home.
The striking difference between Grooveshark and the YouTube of 2012 is the simple fact that a huge portion of uploaded content is legal, meaning uploaded by the artist or label themselves. Only in addition, you get a lot of fan-uploaded tracks (with often rare material). It would be interesting to see how the music catalogue of YouTube compares with the one from e.g. Spotify.
And it seems I’m not the only one with this thinking. Take a look at StreamSquid. Basically the service leverages the YouTube music library and wraps it into an audio player interface.
There are other services that try to do the same, even a Chrome extension that wraps around YouTube itself:
You see, building on top of YouTube would’ve been the wiser choice for Google. Instead of being a me-too against Spotify and others, they had the chance to create and foster their own, pure digital and proprietary music format. And of course it would have integrated the video as well — bringing my childhood dream come true.
This article was first published on January 12, 2012.
