YouTube’s new music service is ever so close yet ever so far…

YouTube Music’s arrival is delayed, that much we know as the service was meant to be launching in Q4 2013, then Q1 2014, but has still not materialised.

Now a Billboard piece attributes the late arrival not to licensing troubles but to the company wanting to launch with a really great product to be able to stand out in a highly competitive market which includes Spotify, Beats Music, Rdio, Rhapsody and internet radio services like Pandora, Slacker and iHeartRadio.

This is at odds with Google’s usual “endless beta” process which accompanies all major product releases, but in this case it will be difficult to completely re-invent a category like it happened with Gmail, so the company’s debut needs to be a fair bit more polished.

According to Billboard sources the core challenge for the service is to provide a visual element to the tracks that will be part of the YouTube music catalogue but don’t have an official video available (which is presumably the majority, given most music streaming services have several million tracks in their catalogues). This could be done via a clever mash-up of stock footage and album artwork, but the final look is still being created.

Even now there doesn’t appear to be a set timetable for release which could come sometime this summer. It remains to be seen whether the delay will diminish the chances of success for the Google-backed service given the quarter-by-quarter increase in the number of people that are choosing Spotify, Rdio or Beats Music as their music subscription service.

(Andrea Leonelli)