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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that Google Play Music subscribers get this for free. IMO it's a huge mistake on Google's part to make them separate yet somehow intertwined memberships - Google Music is the same price as Spotify, but this is a huge extra that many people won't realise they have.

EDIT: I'm not saying that tying them together is bad - quite the opposite - that having them as separate subscriptions that are also the same subscription is weird.

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Except it can be irritating.

I'm a google play music subscriber.

Previously, I could open any youtube link and expect it to play, often with adverts but that's not a big deal.

Now, I open a youtube link and if it's a music video I get told, "You cannot view this video because you are playing music". So I have to stop my music playing to be able to watch the music video.

With youtube red, will it now mean that any video I watch I'll have to stop playing google music, dare I use my subscription in more than one browser at once?

Maybe it's an attempt for the YouTube Red developers to boost their out of the gate numbers?

It seems like it must have something to do with different departments tracking revenue, but the way this is being rolled out is pretty strange. There's no mention of it anywhere on the YouTube homepage, so you would have to search for it specifically, and it's not even the top result on Google when you search for "youtube red." To know that you have access to Google Play Music, you have to scroll all the way down to FAQ point 5. Maybe the subscriptions were integrated recently and the administrative barriers to approve new marketing materials prevented them from being ready for launch. But I can only speculate.

I think with this initial pool of already signed-up users, Red effectively skips the first stage of user attraction.

I am not familiar how accounting works for this, but Red would have a pool of revenue to distribute to from very early on, so the creators would have more incentive to create Red-exclusive content. Nice bootstrap strategy indeed.

Maybe. It's also a pretty fair acknowledgement that Youtube Red is bundling Google Play Music in for the exact same price so "Why should people with Google Play Music have to cancel their subscription to GPM and sign up again for Youtube Red?". Instead just give it to them as part of their current subscription.

The Google Music app nags you about this. I think many will realise they have access.

Eh, they could send out an email and add a banner to the site.

Tying them together makes sense to me in a way. A lot of people (myself included!) use YouTube to listen to music and watch YouTube videos.

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