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YouTube and Garth Brooks Are Forging Two Paths to the Future of Streaming Music

And why Garth Brooks's GhostTunes will likely be left standing outside the fire.
​Garth Brooks going for it. Image: ​Carlos/Flickr

Two new music services diverged in the woods at a familiar fork—one is going for convenience and one is going for fidelity. Last week, country singer Garth Brooks ​unleashed GhostTunes on the world, and this week Google's YouTube Music Key ​is rollin​g out in beta.

The services from both the music industry veteran and the search giant-turned-media-aggregation hub feel pretty familiar. Neither one is likely to "save" the music industry, but their differing strategies reveal where music-as-commodity is at these days. It seems as though YouTube is placing a hedged bet on consumer inertia, while GhostTunes is betting on artist-first consumption of mass-market country music.

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For $9.99 a month, YouTube Music Key will allow people access to Google Play Music's entire library, and provide ad-free music videos. As with Spotify, users are able to download videos, playlists, or whole albums to play offline, and in the background on their mobile devices.

When your internet connection is up for it, Google Play's music streams at "up at 320 kbps," Matt McLernon, a spokesperson for YouTube, told me after checking with the Google Play team. "But we base it off the users' internet connection so we can give them a good experience (meaning if on cell connection, it might be lower than on wifi, so you don't have buffering and that sort of thing)."

Image: YouTube

The base level you're getting off of YouTube, though, is closer to 192k AAC audio, regardless of the quality of the video.

"It's the same as YouTube overall, which uses relatively low bitrates but a high efficiency audio coding," McLernon said. "It's not your audiophile / lossless quality, but it packs a punch for the bandwidth it uses."

In this way and also in how it compensates artists, YouTube's new service is self-described as a lot like Pandora and Spotify.

"For the ad-supported side of YouTube, the majority share of the revenue goes to the partner," McLernon said, "and for the paid subscription our rates are competitive with the streaming industry."

YouTube, which is taking advantage of its massive user base, is making the opposite bets that GhostTunes is. Garth Brooks's new musical distribution system launched just as Taylor Swift was making her high-profile escape from Spotify. If GhostTunes finds a niche, it will likely be as an artist-friendly alternative to the likes YouTube and Spotify.

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Despite sporting a logo that looks like Snapchat and Spotify's logos had a baby, GhostTunes is basically like iTunes, but artists are allowed to stipulate whether you can buy individual tracks, or only full albums—Garth opted for the latter. You can also buy Garth Brooks tickets and merchandise on the page, which is how artists are apparently supposed to be making money anyway, according to downloading and streaming advocates.

But artists are supposed to be getting paid better for what they sell through GhostTunes too. GhostTunes COO Chris Webb told me they "pay up to an 80 percent-20 percent revenue share with artists/labels [and GhostTunes], well above the industry standard. All independent deals we are rolling out are under the 80/20 deal structure."

iTunes takes around 30 percent, so GhostTunes is paying "up to" 10 percent better. And it has Garth Brooks, which iTunes doesn't.

But if the ongoing success of Spotify has taught us anything, though, it's that paying artists and hearing Garth Brooks just don't mean that much to listeners, at least as compared to cheapness and convenience. GhostTunes isn't noticeably cheaper than Amazon or iTunes, and even if all of your music is available for streaming for your "My Locker" account on GhostTunes, going to another website or app is slightly less convenient than the iTunes store, at least for getting music onto your phone.

Go Garth! Image: ​joelrivlin/Flickr

If GhostTunes does have one boast over its competition when it comes to user experience, it's slightly higher audio quality.

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Webb told me, "currently the bitrate download is 320k, but [the company is] looking at providing consumers with an HD quality file related to ongoing technology partner conversations."

Even that 320k is higher than the 256k of Amazon and iTunes—although the latter comparison is somewhat skewed because iTunes uses AAC files, which are said to achieve better sound quality than mp3 files. GhostTunes's fidelity is also higher than the quality one gets with streaming services like Pandora or Spotify (although the latter can go up to 320k with a premium account set to "extreme" download quality).

Fidelity, though, seems like a pretty risky bet. If people insist on audiophile-levels of quality, they won't settle for 192k streaming. They might settle for GhostTunes's 320k, but if fidelity is something you worry about, even 320k is a step down from vinyl (according to guys I know who really care about this too much) or buying from Neil Young's lossless library, Pono.

YouTube has an advantage over almost everyone else: it's already a place where people—especially those ever-desirable young people—go to seek out music. It also already has its free-to-user, ad-based model up and running. The subscription may well prove to be Google's effort to drive people to the underloved Google Play, since it's already making money on YouTube through ads.

GhostTunes is going to have to convince people to get into another downloading musical service, that isn't tethered to their phone, like Apple is, or their general online shopping, like Amazon is, or their searching and email, like Google is. It's an uphill battle.

Still, say whatever you want about Garth Brooks's music, he was the one who blended arena rock theatrics with really poppy country music, which proved to be an extremely lucrative business decision, if nothing else. Of course, Garth Brooks also released that album under the name "Chris Gaines," so he's not exactly infallible. It's not the 90s anymore, Garth.