However, this initiative was considered a failure, as not all videos that contained music were ad-free like they should have been. Music Key allowed the YouTube app to play videos in the background, and was supposed to remove ads from videos with music. Toward the end of 2014, Google tried to combine Play Music All Access with YouTube through a program called YouTube Music Key. With this change of heart also came official uploads of music videos.

Instead of fighting the change, they decided to earn revenue through ads. It’s practically common knowledge that if you wanted to listen to a song on YouTube, you search for the artist and song followed by “lyrics.” This, of course, came with its own set of copyright issues until record companies got with the program. Almost since its inception in 2005, people have used YouTube to listen to music for free. However, this wasn’t Google’s only method for listening to music. Slowly, the service gained the ability to buy songs from the catalogs of major record labels, followed by a full-fledged premium streaming service with All Access in 2013. Google had its first foray into the music streaming industry in 2011 with Google Play Music (then known as Google Music), which started exclusively as a way to upload your personal music library to Google’s cloud, then stream songs back to your phone.

Since launch, we’ve been using YouTube Music extensively to see how it truly fares against some of these rivals. YouTube Music, the latest in Google’s long history of attempts at breaking into the music streaming market, launched last month in 17 countries. However, it may be too late for Google’s latest attempt at music streaming, as the competition is fierce between veteran services like Spotify and Pandora, newcomers like Deezer and Tidal, and of course Apple Music from Google’s biggest competitor.

Pandora vs spotify free