YouTube has brought its rival to Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited to the UK.

Launched in the US in May, the app is now available to British Android and iOS device users and provides free access to millions of video and audio streams of your favourite music tracks.

These are supported by adverts, but you can also pay a YouTube Music Premium subscription - priced at £9.99 a month - to remove the ads and enabled offline listening through downloads. New users can sign up for three months for free.

A family plan is also available for £14.99 a month.

A YouTube Premium subscription service is also to be launched in the UK at the same time, which adds Music Premium but also enables access to TV series and other online video benefits on YouTube beyond music playback. YouTube Premium costs £11.99 a month.

Existing Google Play Music subscribers get YouTube Music Premium access at no extra cost.

YouTube Music works differently in comparison with other music streaming services. For a start, many of the tracks available are based on videos posted on YouTube, so there is a wider choice. You can watch the videos too, which includes the streaming of entire concerts. Only audio can be downloaded to your device as part of Music Premium membership, but you can still listen to entire gigs offline.

There are interesting other features in the Android and iOS apps too, including the ability to have a custom mixtape of up to 100 songs downloaded to your device and updated regularly. The tracks chosen are based on your own favourite artists, as decided when you first launch the app.

As well as the UK release, YouTube Music is now available in plenty of other countries: the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain and Sweden.