YouTube announced on Monday the launch of YouTube Music and YouTube Premium services in Egypt.
YouTube Music is a music streaming application and YouTube Premium is a paid subscription website providing ad-free access to the catalogue of the famous video website worldwide.
“We re proud that Egypt s rich musical heritage has a home on YouTube and we re excited about bringing it closer to our users with YouTube Music," stated Liliana Abu Dalo, head of Music Partnerships at YouTube in the Middle East and North Africa at an online roundtable press conference on Monday.
While it is similar to the experience of other available music platforms like iTunes Anghami, Spotify and others in terms of the worldwide libraries and usability, YouTube Music promises more personalised features and smart search engines depending on Google technologies.
"We built YouTube Music to help people find and enjoy the music they love whether it s through official releases, iconic music videos or favourite live performances all while bringing artists closer to their fans," added Abu Dalo.
In addition to advertisement blocking, YouTube Premium enables background play and offline access to downloaded videos and audio of the music application as well.
“We re also excited to launch YouTube Premium, an ad-free subscription service that allows our users in Egypt to watch all their videos on YouTube without ads, and also enables background play and other amazing features,” stated Hisham El-Nazer, general manager of Google Egypt in a press release.
With a free month trial, the individual and family subscription packages of the two services are between EGP 50 and 90 monthly and all services are to "roll out to all users starting 10 September."
While the YouTube experience is still not recommended for kids without parental guidance, a platform designed for children is currently under construction and it should be released soon.
Active in over 100 countries in 80 languages, the amount of uploaded videos on YouTube has reached 500 hours per minute. Some 70 percent of internet users in Egypt log on YouTube every day.
A mega company headquartered in San Bruno, California, YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform active since 2005 and which Google bought in 2006.
With over two billion logged-in users watching YouTube daily, YouTube say their mission is based on "the values of freedom of expression, Information, opportunity and belonging."
