What you need to know
- YouTube Music paid out a record $8 billion to the music industry in a 12-month period.
- It represents major growth for the platform, as it paid out $6 billion and $4 billion in 2022 and 2021, respectively.
- YouTube Music still lags behind Spotify in terms of overall payouts, but its per-stream payouts are supposedly higher.
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YouTube Music is a relatively young music streaming service compared to industry stalwarts like Spotify, but it's growing fast. The streaming service debuted in 2015 along YouTube Premium, and a decade later, it has over 125 million paid subscribers as of March 2025. The large subscriber count and user base allows YouTube Music to inject more cash into the music industry, and it hit a big milestone in 2025.
YouTube paid out more than $8 billion to the music industry in the year between July 2024 and June 2025, it said in a blog post. The brand says this major payout reaffirms its "commitment to the music industry." It's the most YouTube Music has ever paid out to artists and the music industry at large in a 12-month period, and shows that payouts are rising with subscriber counts.
"Today's $8 billion payout is a testament to the fact that the twin engine of ads and subscriptions is firing on all cylinders," said Lyor Cohen, who is YouTube's global head of music, in the blog post. "This number is not an endpoint; it represents meaningful, sustained progress in our journey to build a long-term home for every artist, songwriter, and publisher on the global stage."
The company attributes the larger payouts to what it calls a "twin-engine revenue model." That includes subscriber revenue from the over 125 million users that pay for either YouTube Music or YouTube Premium. It also includes logged-in viewers who watch music videos on YouTube and see ads — YouTube says there are 2 billion of them each month.
Between revenue sharing from subscribers and ad-supported users, YouTube Music was able to pay out the $8 billion figure to the music industry.
How YouTube Music's payout compares to itself — and the competition
YouTube Music's payouts are rising with its subscriber count. It paid out $4 billion to the music industry in 2021, $6 billion in 2022, and now $8 billion in 2025 (via TechCrunch). Spotify, the industry leader and YouTube Music's biggest competitor, paid $10 billion to the music industry in 2024.
While YouTube Music isn't quite on Spotify's level yet, it's inching closer. Despite having far fewer subscribers, YouTube Music's industry payout is impressive because it pays more on a per-stream basis than Spotify, according to Duetti.
