YouTube’s Standalone Music App Is Out And Here’s What You Need To Know About It

Since YouTube announced that it was going to roll out ad free video music streaming services, it went ahead to roll out its music app last week. The statistics support the idea of a standalone music app. For starters, the app is free but becomes more powerful when you have a YouTube Red subscription. Google owns YouTube and Google already a music app of its own called Google play music and it’s also free y the way. But like every big conglomerate, administrations of services are quite autonomous and its fast becoming a trend for tech giants to release standalone apps for some prominent services within their platforms. An example would be Facebook with a separate app for its messenger, Groups and Pages. YouTube now has 1 billion users and 80% of those users are from outside the United States. Also about 50% of its traffic now comes from mobile. Its three main areas of focus; gaming, kids and music have now grown into almost independent services with dedicated users for each.

YouTube’s Music Insight which was announced earlier in the year provide artists with a more streamlined knowledge of where their most loyal fans/viewers are based.  This is supposed to help them make more informed decision especially regarding tours and concerts. So you see the gradual shift by YouTube from being just a general streaming platform into a more streamlined platform for different services.

That said though, in order to enjoy the new free music app, you would need a YouTube Red subscription. “With YouTube Red, you’ll get to experience all that the Music app has to offer without ads. You’ll also have the ability to listen to music offline and seamlessly switch between video or audio-only (so you can decide whether you actually watch Silentó whip and nae nae). And also be able to hear any video play, even when you’re in another app or have your screen turned off” said T. Jay Fowler who is a Director of Product Management at YouTube.

YouTube Music Player Interface

Here are some of those statistics I talked about earlier from YouTube

• YouTube has over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.
• YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.
• The number of hours people spend watching videos (aka watch time) on YouTube is up 60% y/y, the fastest growth we’ve seen in 2 years.
• The number of people watching YouTube per day is up 40% y/y since March 2014.
• The number of users coming to YouTube who start at the YouTube homepage, similar to the way they might turn on their TV, is up more than 3x y/y.

Product

• 80% of YouTube’s views are from outside of the U.S.
• YouTube has launched local versions in more than 70 countries.
• You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population).

Mobile

• Once users are on YouTube, they are spending more time per session watching videos. On mobile, the average viewing session is now more than 40 minutes, up more than 50% y/y.
• The number of hours people spent watching videos on mobile is up 100% y/y.
• More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices.
• YouTube’s mobile revenue is up 2x y/y.

You can download it on Android here and then from the App Store here for iOS users. There’s a 14 day free trial period after which you have to subscribe for about $10/2,000 Naira/1,000 KES monthly.