YouTube paid more than $8 billion to the music business in the 12-month period of July 2024 to June 2025, Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, said Wednesday (Oct. 22) during a fireside chat with Billboard editor-in-chief Hannah Karp at Billboard Latin Music Week.
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The amount the music business receives from YouTube has doubled in just over three years. YouTube paid out $6 billion to the music business — spanning record labels, music publishers and performance rights organizations — in the 12-month period ended June 2022. The $6 billion payout was a big leap from the $4 billion YouTube paid music rights holders over a 12-month period just over a year earlier.
YouTube doesn’t reveal the number of standalone YouTube Music subscribers, but the company announced in March that it surpassed 125 million global subscribers to both YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, an ad-free version of the video service that includes access to YouTube Music. YouTube also offers a less expensive tier, Premium Lite, that provides ad-free viewing for everything except music videos on the YouTube video platform but excludes ad-free listening on YouTube Music. Royalties are also generated from free, ad-supported music video viewers that totaled 2 billion each month.
The platform has extended its dominance from the smartphone to larger screens. Since February, YouTube has topped Nielsen’s rankings of share of Americans’ TV viewing. In August, YouTube’s 13.1% share was followed by Disney at 9.7%, Netflix at 8.7% and NBCUniversal at 7.6%.
You can read a full recap of Cohen’s Latin Music Week conversation here.
