Is YouTube Remix Music to Your Ears?

As successful and as profitable as Google parent company Alphabet is, we’ve also seen countless times where they’ve fallen flat on their face. Do you remember Google Buzz? With everyone moving toward streaming music services, apparently they want another piece of that pie too with a new internal project dubbed YouTube Remix.

But wait a second… don’t they already have Google Play Music for streaming music? And don’t they already have YouTube Red for premium, ad-free content on YouTube?

Yes. And yes. Which makes this latest development all that more confusing. Bloomberg is reporting that YouTube will be launching this new paid music service in March. As far as I can gather, I’m not entirely sure how “YouTube Remix” is going to play alongside Google Play Music and YouTube Red. Are they going to merge into one thing? Are they going to compete against one another?

It’s obvious enough that Google/YouTube wants to compete on the same playing field as Apple Music and Spotify. With YouTube Remix, as it is being called internally, part of the objective is to get back on good terms with the big record labels. All of us already know about the countless unauthorized uploads to YouTube with copyright music. Sometimes they’re music videos, sometimes they’re fan-made music videos, sometimes they’re lyric videos, and sometimes they’re just the song with a static image.

Warner Music Group has already signed on to work with YouTube Remix, apparently, and negotiations are underway with Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Merlin, the last of which is “a consortium of independent labels.”

The million dollar question, of course, is why you would opt for YouTube Remix over the other existing services. What’s going to set it apart from the crowd?