At €6.99 per month, YouTube’s Premium Lite plan first launched in select European countries in 2021, including Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. It offers ad-free viewing across YouTube’s spectrum of apps and formats but doesn’t come with Premium’s other features like offline downloads, background playback, or any YouTube Music benefits.
But soon, existing Premium Lite subscribers will be left with two options: go back to watching YouTube with ads or subscribe to the pricier YouTube Premium that also includes YouTube Music. In an email notifying users of the change, YouTube says it will offer Lite subscribers a one-month free trial of YouTube Premium, regardless of whether they’ve had a trial before. It notes that subscribers will need to cancel their Lite subscription or wait for it to be canceled in order to redeem the offer. YouTube raised the price of its Premium and Music subscriptions in the US in July.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
This ‘Premium Lite’ plan does indeed sound like the best YouTube subscription for me. I subscribed to YouTube Premium at the start of the year because I was offered a couple of months free of charge with my purchase of a new Samsung Galaxy smartphone, and continued because I was increasingly annoyed by YouTube ads long before that and couldn’t stand the thought of returning to forced ad breaks. The most obnoxious for me were the ads that would sometimes pop up five seconds into the video – you did not even get a chance to see what the video was about before getting interrupted! I never used the other features included in the plan, such as offline downloads and background playback, so a basic ad-free plan without any added features would have been perfect.
I tried giving YouTube Music a shot – after all, YouTube Premium costs the same as Spotify Premium, so I could potentially drop Spotify and cut my monthly content costs – but couldn’t get over some interface glitches, such as how you could accidentally reorder playlists simply by trying to scroll. Another major drawback is that every music track played on YouTube Music shows up in YouTube’s main history, clogging it with dozens and dozens of entries and making it more difficult to resume videos you started before.
I suspect the main reason behind removing the Lite option is precisely to incentivize people to switch away from competitors. This type of bundling has a long history in Silicon Valley, and is regularly used in anticompetitive ways to undercut companies that don’t have a bundle of their own – in this case Spotify, as Apple and Amazon customers are unlikely to renounce their respective ecosystems. Google recently announced it is sunsetting its podcast app in favor of YouTube Music sometime next year, which also supports this bundling strategy, and aligns its features more closely to what Spotify is offering.
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