This is for people who watch Youtube on their TV and don’t want to see ads.

Exactly, it's sort of reasonably priced. $6.50 would be better, but it's fine.

I primarily watch YouTube on my TV and it would be great to be able to unbundle YouTube Music. They've already tried this in Denmark, but failed to advertise it, like at all. There also was no option to downgrade, you had to cancel and then sign up again.

If I was not on a grandfathered YouTube family account for $23, I would have taken this downgrade and chose a different music provider.

I’d gladly pay 60% the price for Premium without Music (as I have Spotify already), and no background play is an acceptable tradeoff (as I ~never watch on my phone, and I don’t need YouTube’s permission for background play on my computer, and I don’t need background play at all on my TV).

I've never even considered Spotify because I already have YT. Modulo the social bandwagon, seems like it's the same offering and one also gives you ad-free YT, so it's been a no-brainer for me.

Makes me wonder how many people would use YTM if they only had the full premium option, but will split subscriptions across YT and Spotify with this new offering.

I just torrent music. Call me old.

My Spotify account from 2013 predates paid subscriptions on YouTube (2015). I’ve played around with the YTM app, but was not convinced. Also, I don’t want any video with my music, can YTP guarantee I’ll never have my bandwidth wasted by it, and I won’t have music video-specific additions in my ears?

I've had an account since it was Google Music All Access.

YTM wants to be a peer of Spotify in the same way that Google Music was positioned against iTunes. Google Music was actually a better product if you're used to buying music (the Library section in YTM is a total afterthought). YouTube Music assumes you're streaming. It's still primarily a music player - I think you can watch music videos through it if you try, but its main purpose is audio, and the corpus it pulls music from I assume is the same as all the music streaming services. It's not like it's playing music videos and hiding the picture.

Honestly, the experience on YTM can be a little rough. It doesn't have the level of polish that Rdio had before it. But subscribing takes the ads off of YouTube, and I can deal with a slightly rougher app to also make my streaming video experience better.

NewPipe/PipePipe are Android alternatives with background play.

YouTube ensures that this option remains as annoying as possible though, requiring constant (~weekly) updates to the NewPipe app - I assume they keep introducing tiny incompatible changes to the way video downloads work just so that NewPipe will have to keep adapting and pushing out new updates.

It's impressive the amount of work the NewPipe folks put in, both to keep up with this and to make the app more feature complete over time.

It’s for people who use YouTube for the video content (as opposed to only for the audio), which is most people.

I'm pretty sure this is a re-launch of the lite tier they already had in lower income countries at a higher price, instead of making a tier for people that don't like ads and also don't use Youtube as their primary music platform.

Someone will be promoted for the launch.

The fact that background play is locked behind a paywall was always absurd in the first place. There's no technical explanation for why it's paywalled, Google can't play the bandwidth card because they're Google.

They can't deliver ads on offline viewing.

Paywalls are never for technical reasons.

Spot on - they woulda had me if they'd allowed background

I probably wouldn't even use it, but don't like to reward stingy dark patterns