Globally, YouTube has over 80 million music and Premium subscribers, including those who are currently enrolled in free trials.
Lyor Cohen, the company’s worldwide head of Music, stated in a blog post that this represents a rise of 30 million users year over year and “a significant milestone for music on YouTube, our subscribers, and artists”.
Cohen cites YouTube’s “dual engine of revenue”—subscriptions and ads—as the key reason for its success, stating that the company earned $6 billion in revenue for the music business between July 2021 and June 2022, 30% of which came from user-created material.
“And now we’ve reached this 80+ million milestone by building a subscription service with the music industry that puts fans first,” Cohen said. “Hopefully these milestones demonstrate our commitment to becoming the [No. 1] contributor of revenue to the music industry.”
With a $9.99 (KSh 1,098 per month YouTube Music Premium subscription, users may remove commercials, download songs for offline listening on their phones, and access playlists that are automatically downloaded depending on their listening habits. While accessing YouTube Music and Originals, removing the site’s numerous advertising, and downloading videos for offline viewing on mobile devices are all included with YouTube Premium, which costs $11.99 (KSh 1,343) per month.
As TechCrunch notes, YouTube’s 80 million milestones still leave it far behind rivals like Spotify and Apple Music, each of which has triple-digit paid subscribers. Even the China-only Tencent music service has roughly 3 million more subscribers than YouTube Premium. It’s unclear whether or how the Google-owned company’s recent price hikes will impact those figures.