Google is such a huge company and each service/product is run by a different team of people, so it can become difficult to keep things synced together and inline with each other. We see this quite often when application updates including new features get pushed to iOS before they arrive in the Play Store for Android. The same thing happened a couple of years ago when Google launched YouTube Music even though Google Play Music All Access was already a paid service.

Then the launch of YouTube Red confused things even more as it created so much overlap between the different subscription services that Google offered. Google at least attempted to resolve some of this when they confirmed a YouTube Red subscription would include YouTube Music as well as Google Play Music All Access. But this still confuses the average customer as they're paying for one service in order to get access to others.

Google is well aware of the issue and YouTube's head of music just confirmed that both YouTube Red and Google Play Music would be combining into a new service sometime in the future. This is very important to the company and they're actively developing a way of launching it. Which is something that has been rumored for a while as the company had even combined the teams who were working on these two streaming services back in February of this year.

It'spossible that the two individual applications will merge, but they want to educate the customers better so they're able to advertise to the music market more efficiently. This is the entire goal here too, to make services like YouTube Red more popular within the music community. Google says music is an important service to offer and they feel combining these two services into a new single brand will help spread awareness instead of having them divided.


Source: The Verge