Free streaming tiers available to owners of two popular home devices.
Amazon announced plans to make Amazon Music available for free — with ads — to Echo owners.
Now Google has made YouTube Music available for free — with ads — to people who use Google Home smart speakers and Google Assistant-powered speakers (in select regions, including North America and Europe).
How will two new ad-supported streaming services alter the industry?
There’s a good article about what Amazon’s ad-supported strategy might mean not JUST for Google, who’s already responded in kind, but to Spotify and Facebook as well.
I personally don’t see Apple straying from the course it’s set for the HomePod and Apple Music, but it will be interesting to watch if and how this ad-supported streaming trend spreads to other home devices.
Got a home device? Will you suffer through some ads to save a few bucks?
Or — ya know — is music, like, worth PAYING for? ; )
Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.