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YouTube Music and YouTube Premium officially launch in US, Canada, UK, and other countries

YouTube Music and YouTube Premium officially launch in US, Canada, UK, and other countries

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Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

YouTube Music and YouTube Premium have officially launched today in 17 countries. As of today, both services are available to all in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, South Korea, Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. YouTube Music began a soft rollout to some users late last month, but now anyone can try it.

YouTube Music is the company’s new, all-encompassing music streaming service, and it comes with both “a reimagined mobile app” and a new desktop interface designed specifically for music. It features traditional, album versions of songs as well as live performances, tracks from unsigned artists, remixes, covers, and more. It focuses on music discovery, and the home screen will continually serve new recommendations based upon your listening history, location, and activity. It also has intelligent search powered by machine learning, so it can understand and return the right results for queries that Spotify and Apple Music stumble on.

Like other music streaming services, YouTube Music comes with free and premium tiers. The free version is ad-supported, while ad-free YouTube Music Premium is $9.99 a month and allows for background listening (for audio tracks only) and downloads.

YouTube Premium is slightly higher at $11.99 per month, but it includes everything YouTube Music offers plus background listening for videos and an ad-free experience across all content on YouTube. It also includes access to YouTube Originals, which includes Cobra KaiImpulse, soccer documentary F2 Finding Football, and The Sidemen Show. They’re not much of a selling point right now, but Google says options for Originals will expand in the future with “bigger original series and movies,” including comedies, dramas, reality series, and action-adventure shows from the UK, France, Mexico, and other countries.

Anyone who already has a Google Play Music subscription in the US, Australia, New Zealand, or Mexico will get access to YouTube Premium as part of their membership. Those with Google Play Music subscriptions in other countries will get access to YouTube Music Premium at their current price as it becomes available.

In an efforts to get people to switch over, YouTube is offering a limited promotion where you can try out YouTube Music for free for three months.