YouTube Music surpasses 50 million subscribers and continues to grow

The service has added around 1.8 million subscribers per month since October and now has around 8% of subscribers worldwide

Photo: via Unsplash YouTube is finally breaking into the market for pay music. The Google-owned platform has announced that it has passed the 50 million subscriber milestone.

This figure includes subscriptions to YouTube Music Premium and the broader YouTube Premium service that allows you to watch videos without ads. In addition, subscribers still on trial are also counted. YouTube has not yet shared the revenue that comes from these subscriptions which cost 10 and 12 euros respectively.

Although Spotify remains the first paid music service by a large margin, YouTube is the fastest growing world, according to Midia Research. Suffice it to say that just a year ago the service had 20 million fewer users than today. Doing a quick calculation it turns out that YouTube Music has added around 1.8 million subscribers per month since October and now has around 8% of subscribers worldwide.

Spotify reported that it had reached 165 million. subscribers in the second quarter of this year, while Apple and Amazon had 78 million and 63 million respectively at the end of the first quarter, according to Midia estimates. The difference with YouTube Music is that all of these services came first: Spotify was launched in 2008, Apple Music in 2015, and Amazon Music Unlimited in 2016.

The major architect of the change of course is Lyor Cohen, a longtime record executive who has worked with artists such as Kanye West and knows the world of music well. Cohen started working for YouTube 5 years ago. Thanks to Cohen, YouTube tried to bolster its promotional tools by hosting live previews of artists' videos and making deals with record labels.

YouTube Music didn't have much success for the first 10 months of launch , in mid-2018. Now things are going very well, especially in the emerging record markets, as told by Robert Kyncl, YouTube's chief business officer, who stressed the rapidity of growth in those contexts. So did Cohen, who wrote in his newsletter that he noted "impressive growth in countries like South Korea, India, Japan, Russia and Brazil."

Cohen added that YouTube Music does not want to “take its foot off the accelerator” and it is investing in new features and benefits for members. Spotify and the others are notified.


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Music Social media YouTube globalData.fldTopic = "Music, Social media, YouTube "

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