Before now, if you wanted some of YouTube’s epic music videos created by artists, indies, and fans on-demand you would have to use a youtube downloader service to download them or manually create a playlist for the app. While these methods may still have their merits, a new service being offered by YouTube itself hopes to improve audio fans experience with the video platform further.

YouTube is launching a music streaming service next week (May 22), offering both videos and audio tracks, in an attempt to compete with likes of Spotify and Apple Music.

This service will be available to use for free, but there will have ads that will play every few songs. Listeners also won’t be able to download music for offline listening on this tier either. For ad-free music and downloads, you will need to subscribe to YouTube Music Premium, which is formally known as YouTube Red.

Subscribers will be able to choose between a free service with ads, YouTube Music at the rate of $9.99 per month or YouTube Premium at $11.99 a month. If you already subscribe to YouTube Red, you will be automatically transferred over without a price increase.

The new service offers the opportunity to stream millions of tracks alongside YouTube’s vast catalog of rarities and remixes uploaded by users. Subscribers will also be able to access personalized playlists based on their streaming history, similar to Spotify’s Discover Weekly function. This also means that huge competition is en route for independent musicians and content creators. However, those who want to leave their mark on this competition might want to look at Jeff Bullas and similar web portals to learn the tips and tricks of acquiring more likes on this platform.

Many believe that this decision of releasing a new music streaming service was taken earlier in the month of October. It is believed to be a calculated decision to further boost the growth of Youtube. Moreover, it was announced that Billboard would be making changes to their streaming rules. Stating that paid subscription-based services such as SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music will hold more weight in chart calculations than ad-supported services such as YouTube and hybrid paid/ad-supported services.

YouTube Music is set to debut in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and South Korea before expanding to 14 other countries.