Google’s subsidiary YouTube announced on Wednesday, November 9, that it had reached 80 million subscribers to its paid services worldwide, a gain of 30 million subscribers in one year for the platform that intends to become one of the leading players in the music industry.
“You’ve heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again: the two growth drivers for YouTube – subscriptions and advertising – are serious business,” Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, boasted in a blog post. He said that 80 million subscribers includes users on free trials.
At the end of August 2022, YouTube said it had contributed USD 6 billion to the music industry over the past 12 months. Last year, it had posted its ambition to “become the first source of revenue for the music industry”.
YouTube, Google’s free video division, promotes two paid offers, YouTube Musiquè and YouTube Premium, which cost respectively 9.99 USD and 11.99 USD per month (just like in France, but in euros) to enjoy videos without ads, offline and in the background (i.e. with other applications open).
With all these offers, “we have established partnerships with companies like Samsung, like SoftBank (Japan), Vodafone (Europe), LG U+ (Republic of Korea) and Google services like Google One,” said Cohen, emphasizing their “essential role” in reaching the 80 million subscribers mark.
Despite all this, YouTube remains far behind Spotify, number one in music streaming, which has 195 million paying subscribers. It will also have to deal with competition from Amazon, which announced earlier this month that it had given its 200 million “Prime” subscribers free, ad-free access to a catalog of 100 million songs and podcasts.
The giant, Apple has not reported the number of subscribers to Apple Music since June 2019, when it had indicated that it had crossed the threshold of 60 million paying users.
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