YouTube Music will no longer include videos in its free version

YouTube Music has proven itself to be an intuitive, feature-full, and worthy competitor to other music streaming services on the market. One of its most distinguishable features is the ability to watch the music videos that accompany the tracks you want to listen to.

Until now, watching videos was available to both paid subscribers and free users of the service. However, soon you will have to pay up if you want to watch anything on the app. In other words, YouTube Music is losing one of its most attractive features, at least when it comes to the free version.

Of course, you can always switch to the regular YouTube app whenever you want to check out your favorite artist’s new music video. Essentially, the only issue here is that you have to swap apps in order to transition from just listening to a song to also watching it—all in all, not a big deal.

The free tier of YouTube Music will still offer you the option of playing tracks in the background, listening to your playlists on shuffle, and exploring new songs. If you do decide to pay the $9.50 for the premium subscription, though, you will get back the music videos, have unlimited skips, and will get rid of those pesky ads.

The removal of music videos from the free YouTube Music version will happen on November 3. Region-wise, the streaming service has stated it will start with Canada and then continue with a “global expansion”.

We are starting to see more and more of these services testing out the waters of what their users are willing to sacrifice and at what costs. Apple, for example, recently announced a special, more affordable subscription to Apple Music that drops the price to $5 but limits you to using only Siri for navigating through the interface.

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