Google and YouTube have officially announced that paid subscription service they’ve been hinting about for a while now. YouTube Music Key will offer users ad-free music videos and access to thousands of full albums, as well as adding features to the company’s mobile app like offline play and background listening. The service will cost $9.99 a month—with an introductory promotional rate of $7.99—and initial access to the beta will be invite-only.
In many ways, the new service will act as video-focused upgrade to Google Music All Access, the streaming service launched by YouTube’s parent company last year. A subscription to YouTube Music Key includes full access to the more than 30 million songs in Google Music’s library, and the company has announced that it’ll soon be integrating the ability to watch YouTube music videos into the Google Music app. It’s not clear yet if the company will continue to keep the two services nominally separate—Google currently charges that same $9.99 price tag for a month‘s access to Google Music—or if they’ll be folded together into a single product.
So far, YouTube’s target for the new service seems to be the mobile user demographic, with many of the Music Key features aimed at users of the company’s iOS and Android apps. Subscribers will be able to save songs to play while offline, and stream music while the app is running in the background of their mobile device.
Of course, no multimedia launch in the modern era would be complete without an Apple-style promotional video set to inspirational-sounding indie music, so here you go with that: