YouTube Music (ad-supported), YouTube Music Premium (ad-free), YouTube Premium (ad-free) have been launched in India. With the launch, India's music and video streaming space has become even more crowded. Both services were originally introduced in June last year in seventeen countries, including the United States, and have taken over eight months to reach the Indian shores. YouTube Music and YouTube Premium started popping up for some users over the weekend but now everyone can sign up for them. These join Google's already available Google Play Music and Google Play Movies services and will be taking on a host of competing streaming platforms in the country. Interestingly, YouTube Music has been expanded to the country just days after the launch of Spotify.
According to YouTube, YouTube Music will be available both as a standalone mobile app and a Web-based desktop interface that is designed for music streaming. The service offers original songs, albums, thousands of playlists, and artist radio as well as YouTube's own catalogue of remixes, live performances, covers, and music videos. The company is offering two tiers of the service – YouTube Music, which is free/ ad-supported, and YouTube Music Premium, which is paid/ ad-free - like most other music streaming services in the market. YouTube Music Premium subscription will allow the users to play songs and videos in the background while they do other things on their smartphones, something that is not available in standard YouTube experience. Additionally, the paid subscribers will also get offline downloads. YouTube Music Premium subscription has been priced starting Rs. 99 a month. There is also an introductory offer of three months free subscription for YouTube Music Premium, but it will only be available to the users who have never previously tried or used any of YouTube or Google's music streaming...