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YouTube Premium and Music crosses the 50 million subscriber mark

Toward the end of 2020, Google retired Google Play Music and replaced it with YouTube Music. While this caused some disruptions for users, it seems that unifying its media consumption products under one banner was a good move.

That’s because YouTube has reported that subscriptions for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music have crossed the 50 million subscriber mark. This figure also includes those making use of the free trial.

While Spotify is still the dominating entity in the music streaming space with 365 million users and 165 million subscribers, Google’s gains are impressive.

“The unique offerings of YouTube Music and Premium are resonating in established and emerging music markets alike. We’re seeing impressive growth in countries like Korea, India, Japan, Russia and Brazil where music is a top passion,” writes global head of music at YouTube, Lyor Cohen.

Of course YouTube bundles its Music subscription with YouTube Premium and the value that presents is unquestionable. However, at least for some of us at Hypertext, Spotify is still the king of music streaming thanks to its incredible algorithm that sometimes feels like it knows you better than you do.

Aside from passing the 50 million subscriber and trialer (YouTube’s word not ours) mark, YouTube has also paid out $4 billion to the music industry in the past year.

But there is something rather nefarious about that figure.

“Of the more than $4 billion generated for artists, songwriters, and rights-holders in the last 12 months, over 30% has come from UGC [user generated content]. Fan-powered videos have always flourished on YouTube, helping artists grow their audiences and break songs around the world. We’re thrilled it’s now also become a meaningful and incremental source of revenue alongside premium music content,” Cohen said in June.

While copyright infringement is not something we support, we have to wonder how much of that 30 percent figure was derived from creators using a snippet of a song or the like. Record labels are infamously quick to lay rights to videos which feature even a snippet of a song they have the rights to. We won’t go into a rant about copyright and YouTube as we’ve already done that recently.

We’re curious to see how long it takes YouTube Premium and YouTube Music to reach 100 million subscribers. With growth sitting at 60 percent year-on-year, it might not take all that long.

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