Rumored YouTube Music Service Delayed to 2014

If you were anxiously anticipating the arrival of YouTube’s rumored subscription music service, well, we’ve got some gloomy Google news: it won’t be launching this year as planned. It’s now slated for release next year.

YouTube, one of the world’s largest providers of free music (through videos both official and unofficial), headlined reports earlier this year when people discovered it potentially planned to launch a subscription-based music delivery service in 2013. As of discussions AllThingsD had with “people familiar with the company’s plan” this morning, the project’s release date is now set for Q1 2014.

Additionally, the informants indicate that YouTube already acquired the necessary licenses for publishing music on the service, but the product itself isn’t up to the company’s high expectation of quality.

As usual, this should be taken with a grain or six of salt – as YouTube themselves have never formally announced or acknowledged work on such a product, though breadcrumbs left in the company’s mobile app, in addition to discussions had publicly for months, makes its existence all but confirmed.

What Google has to figure out now, assuming they haven’t already, is how to best nurture and diversify this new music service from the newly-introduced Google Play Music service, another subscription-based music product from Google. On the other hand, maybe they’ll even be crazy enough to combine these services into a cohesive brand.

Nobody knows just yet how this will all go, but as is standard for Google news, it should be exciting to see unfold.