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10 Years Ago This Week: YouTube Music Launches

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week of November 21, 2015.

Ten years ago this week the YouTube Music app launched.

Streaming Music with YouTube's Video Catalog


YouTube Music app in the Google Play Store in 2015. The app screenshot shows "Stations created for you" with "endless personalized music.


The new YouTube Music app was (and still is) the entrance to the huge music catalog on YouTube. It would recommend tracks for you to listen to, and create personalized "stations" of streaming music. 

In 2015 YouTube was promoting itself as a music platform, even running their first (and only) music awards show honoring "the biggest and emerging artists to watch." (There had been one previous music awards show focused on fan favorites in 2013, which didn't go well.)

It was announced as "coming soon" during the launch of YouTube Red subscriptions in October 2015, and a YouTube Red subscription included ad-free and offline listening. 

This was a different experience than Google Play Music, which let you purchase individual tracks and even upload your own music for listening. 

Competing with Apple Music?  

One of the things I've learned in putting together this series of retrospective posts is that the big tech companies often launched similar features. This was no exception.

In June Apple had launched their own music streaming service.

What YouTube offered, that Apple could not, was their entire video catalog, including remixes, covers, lyric videos and concert footage. 

The view from 2025

YouTube Music on the web, 20 November 2025.

In the past decade Google consolidated all of its listening options in YouTube Music and launched Music as a stand-alone service. 

In 2018 YouTube launched YouTube Music Premium subscriptions, with an updated mobile app and desktop player. This separated the music listening features from YouTube Red (renamed YouTube Premium) ad-free and offline video viewing. The new YouTube Premium subscriptions included YouTube Music Premium.

Google Play Music was shut down in December 2020. Listeners could migrate their music library over to YouTube Music, and podcast subscriptions to Google Podcasts, so not all was lost. 

In 2023 YouTube Music added podcasts, and users of the stand-alone Google Podcast app were migrated to the platform before Google Podcasts shut down in 2024. YouTube currently has the biggest podcast audience (including both audio and videos).

YouTube Music has almost as many subscribers as Apple Music, but both lag far behind Spotify. And TikTok doesn't offer music subscriptions, but seems to be the place where music is discovered (or rediscovered).

But I suspect those numbers can be a bit misleading, because you can't easily separate people listening to music and podcasts in the YouTube Music app or site and YouTube proper. 

It's a nice setup for YouTube Creators. Anyone can make a new podcast by simply adding videos to a special playlist. Music videos can be remixed into Shorts. And any musician or singer can be discovered in the YouTube Music app (although I don't know how often that happens). 


And it's good that listeners have choices!

References

YouTube Blog, 12 November 2015, A YouTube build just for music (original article). Watch the promo video.


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