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| © Provided by Penske Media Corporation YouTube Music |
By Andy Meek, BGR
If you’re trying to figure out a solid long-term play to juice
sign-ups to a subscription service, hooking people as early as possible
is a smart way to go, providing you can sign them up early and keep them
over the long term, of course. We’re seeing a number of services go
this route, with YouTube being the latest to start offering discounted
student plans for the ad-free version of YouTube as well as its
subscription music service.
Spotify started offering half-priced student plans a few years ago, and then last year added a student bundle that includes Hulu and Showtime. Apple Music went down the same route in 2016. In a company blog post
today, YouTube says its new student plan for YouTube Premium will cost
$6.99 instead of the normal $11.99 a month, and for YouTube Music
Premium the cost is $4.99 as opposed to $9.99 a month. Students who sign
up by January 31st can also lock in a special rate of $5.99 a month for
YouTube Premium.
By way of explaining what the offerings themselves actually are, the
post notes that “YouTube Music is a new music streaming service with
official albums, playlists and singles, as well as a vast catalog of
music videos, remixes, live performances, covers and more — all with
ad-free, background and offline access. YouTube Premium extends that
ad-free experience across all of YouTube, and includes access to YouTube
Originals.”
The
video component is the way YouTube’s premium music offering seems to
stand out against similar offerings from Pandora, Spotify and the like.
You also get access to covers and live versions of songs that live on
YouTube that you can’t find anywhere else. And paying for the monthly
version not only strips out the interruption of ad breaks, but you also
can keep listening in the background and download tracks for offline
listening.
YouTube says that the student discounts can be taken
advantage of if you’re a full-time student at any accredited college or
university in the US. Other countries will get access to this deal
sometime in the future. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how much a
boost this will give to YouTube’s subscription base. As of now,
Alphabet-owned YouTube hasn’t disclosed how much of its monthly base of
1.8 billion users subscribes to its premium offerings.
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