Google Play Music, Google Play Music All-Access, YouTube Music Key, then YouTube Music Key becomes YouTube Music and we also now have YouTube Red.

My what a tangled web you weave dearest Google.

“Hello, Confusion.  How are you?  We are the internet!”

In my case, I have it easy, I pay for Google Play Music All-Access, so I get all of these extraneous YouTube bits; however, what about the potential customers that did not start out by having a subscription to Google Play Music?  One can certainly see how there is room for confusion, especially with the duplicity between the apps that are presented to us.

YouTube Music is essentially the YouTube app with a focus on music.  It behaves just like YouTube with all of the swipe gestures you are familiar with; however, it curates music in a fashion that is similar to Google Play Music All-Access — certainly a good thing and allows for a bit of content discovery along the way.  But the question here is does this app do anything that the traditional YouTube app cannot do?  Certainly if I fire up the latest video from Maroon 5 or Jeezy both apps will display content that is like what is playing, rap songs showing more rap, pop songs showing more pop — this is content discovery.  Here is where it gets mushy, YouTube Music behaves like Google Play Music as it streams playlists together for you, which if you were in the YouTube app, you would have to create those playlists yourself — but does this really matter?  In both cases, since I subscribe to Google Play Music All-Access, I can put YouTube or YouTube Music in the background and listen to the audio rather than seeing the video.

The paradox here is that people certainly go to YouTube for music, but is the experience of having YouTube Music that much better than just using the regular app?

I don’t think so.

Bottom line:  Why?