YouTube Wants Music Service Subscriptions Bad, Will Use Dirty Tactics To Get Them

Since its inception, YouTube has been something of an unofficial music streaming service for users, which is one of the reasons why it exploded in popularity. When people found out that they could listen to any music or watch any music video anytime they wanted for free, radio and music TV stations basically died. It seems those days are done, however, with YouTube being willing to use dirty tactics to force users into subscribing to its new paid music service.

In an interview with Bloomberg, YouTube’s global head of music Lyor Cohen revealed the company’s plans to milk its heaviest music listeners for money. The platform will basically load music videos of or by artists under record labels with so many ads that the user will get frustrated.

To be clear, this only applies to those users who are basically treating YouTube like Spotify, where they can listen to music on-demand, but without paying for anything. The more music videos they play, the more ads they will get. This will continue up to the point where listening to free music on the platform becomes unbearable.

This is exactly what YouTube wants, with Cohen saying “You’re not going to be happy after you are jamming ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and you get an ad right after that.” It would certainly be frustrating for users to have their flow interrupted by obnoxious ads about unrelated products or services.

As Engadget notes, this move is basically intended to please everybody that YouTube has to deal with. The artists who created the music and songs featured on the free platform have never been happy that they weren’t getting paid. YouTube is just trying to make sure that it shares some of the wealth to the people responsible for the music, to begin with, while still providing music streaming to users.

Of course, since this move is essentially tantamount to coercion, only time will tell if it actually works. Breaking habits can be difficult, so it likely will.