Google Home Speakers Get Free YouTube Music Streaming

Google Home owners can now use the smart speaker to stream audio from YouTube Music for free. This provides those customers with music streaming on Google Home straight out of the box, but there is a catch: the free service is subsidized by the presence of advertisements. Google Home users will need to setup the speaker to use YouTube Music before they can use the new perk, however.

YouTube Music Premium is a music streaming service from YouTube that enables users to stream audio without advertisements, and with certain perks like offline content access. A subscription costs $9.99/month, but there's also the free YouTube Music tier, which includes advertisements in exchange for free access.

Google Home speakers support multiple music streaming services, including Pandora, Deezer, Spotify, Google Play Music, and YouTube Music. In order to stream content from YouTube Music on a Google Home speaker, however, you needed the Premium subscription, otherwise it wouldn't work and you'd need to use a different service.

That changes starting today. Google Home speakers can stream free ad-supported YouTube Music content in the US, Canada, Mexico, most of Europe, and Japan. Google says it will be adding other countries to the "supported" list soon.

To use the service on Google Home, users needs to select YouTube Music as the default music service. This change can be made in the Google Home app's Account Settings menu, where users will find (and need to tap) Services > Music. After selecting YouTube Music as the default service, any music requests made to the user's Google Home speakers will automatically be pulled from YouTube.