It’s Been Three Weeks and YouTube Music Still Hasn’t Launched

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Lyor Cohen, YouTube Music’s chief

YouTube Music splashily announced its arrival last month.  So where is it?

So far, it looks like a smattering of industry VIPs and hand-plucked journalists have gotten a glimpse of YouTube Music.  But as the calendar approaches mid-June, YouTube’s heavily-hyped music revamp remains nonexistent.

Currently, music.youtube.com displays a ‘Coming Soon’ placeholder, with other first-round countries like Mexico witnessing the same.

Even worse, YouTube has been running ads for its newly-launched service.  But the ads link back to a Coming Soon page, at least here in the U.S.

+ YouTube Music Is Now Running Ads — for a Site That Hasn’t Launched

We’ve even heard reports of people receiving emails to check out the service, with the same dead end result.  Apparently these people signed up to be notified of a launch on the ‘Coming Soon’ page.  Which they were then sent back to.

Separately, we’re hearing rumblings of near-term (or ongoing) launches in New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, and certain areas in South Korea.  Those countries are all part of the first tier of countries, though it now looks like YouTube is staggering its country-by-country launches as well.

Actually, early reviews sounds pretty solid.  Apparently YouTube is managing to cram its immense music selection into a workable interface.  Whether that gets people to pay is another question entirely — especially given some serious confusion involving earlier premium misfires.

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But when YouTube Music does finally pop its head out, we have a feeling we’ll know about it. Earlier, YouTube said that it was pushing the largest advertising campaign in its history to support the music launch.  YouTube Music product director T. Jay Fowler told Bloomberg that “this will be the biggest marketing spend YouTube has done to-date.”