More Than 50M People Now Subscribe to YouTube Music

YouTube Music has hit a new milestone as its paid subscribers now total 50 million, YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen wrote.

The figure includes people paying for YouTube Music and people paying for YouTube Premium, who get the music as part of their subscription, as well as people who have not subscribed but use the service on a trial basis. The numbers are a boon for the company in the face of long-held critiques that it was giving away much of its content for free, according to the report.

The news also comes as Google has experimented with charging for music for years now. The tech giant has seen several different products it tried not have much success, the report stated.

The current YouTube music service has been in operation since 2018 and has been more successful, as it holds the title of the fastest growing music subscription service in the world, according to Midia Research. It now accounts for about 8% of the world’s subscribers, although Spotify still widely eclipses it.

But YouTube is a long-held bastion for the music promotion business, with many artists still making music videos as a ploy to go viral on the video site. Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, has overseen the implementation of several new promotional tools, which have been letting artists host live premieres for their music and interact with fans in real time. Earlier this year, Cohen said the company had paid out more than $4 billion to the music industry in the past 12 months, which seems to have finally done the trick after years of trying to sway negative opinions.

The company did not say how much it was generating in revenue from subscriptions, and it also didn’t say how much users were paying on average for the services.

In August, YouTube had paid over $30 billion to more than 2 million video producers via ads, merchandise and more in the the three years prior.

Read more: YouTube Has Paid $30B+ to Creators in Last 3 Years