YouTube Music Key extends trial phase

YouTube’s planned paid platform, Music Key, has just extended its free trial period.

Music Key launched in beta last November with the version set to last until mid-September 2015 at least. However, its free trial users, including tech news website Music Ally, received an email from YouTube notifying them they would now be charged $7.99 a month.

“Thanks again for subscribing to YouTube Music Key beta. Your free trial has ended, and you’ll be charged £7.99/month starting today. Your receipt for your first payment is below,” the automated email to Music Ally read.

YouTube later revealed the email was sent by mistake but that the free trial period would be extended. YouTube didn’t tell Music Ally when the trial period would be extended to but its believed the video giant won’t start charging users for Music Key until the full launch.

In July YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki spoke at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech event in Aspen, where she said Music Key will launch in 2015.

In June 2014, YouTube’s full contract for independent labels leaked. The document for Music Key required indies to give up the practice of ‘windowing’ whereby it would make content available exclusively (for a given time frame) to another digital outlet like iTunes. It also insisted royalty payments be reduced to match deals with all labels in a “most favoured nation” clause.

These shocking clauses were felt by Australia where the independent sector accounts for around one-third of all streams on legitimate services.

YouTube later reached an agreement with global body Merlin; details weren’t released.

Earlier this week Neilsen reported that in the first half of 2015 YouTube’s music video views grew 60.6% faster than all audio streaming services combined, including free and pay tiers of those services. It found that YouTube’s music video view growth was up 109.2% in the first half of this year, serving 76.6 billion music video streams.

The compiled stats did not include Pandora, but did include Spotify, TIDAL, Apple Music, Rdio, Xbox Music and Google Play.

Despite this, Nielsen’s annual Music 360 report, released this week, showed Americans are still reticent to pay for streaming services. The report found that only 27% of consumers discovered new music via a music streaming service (including YouTube). The top three reasons consumers gave for not subscribing were that services are too expensive (46%), they can stream music for free elsewhere (42%), and they didn’t think they’d use a service enough to justify the spend (38%).