Business News Digital Labels & Publishers

YouTube paid out $6 billion to the music industry over the last year

By | Published on Wednesday 14 September 2022

YouTube

YouTube has announced that it handed more than $6 billion over to the music industry in the twelve months to June this year. That, it says, is an increase of $2 billion year on year, with 30% of the payout coming from music used in user-generated content.

In a blog post announcing the figures, YouTube’s Global Head Of Music, Lyor Cohen, states: “We want our twin engine of ads and subscriptions to be the number one contributor of revenue to the [music] industry by 2025. That’s why YouTube is monetising all music formats (short and long form video, audio tracks, live, etc), on all platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile, and TV), in over 100 countries. And overall watch time of music content on YouTube across desktop, tablet, mobile and TV continues to grow year over year”.

“As our twin engine continues to hum”, he continues, warming to his metaphor, “we’re seeing profound changes in music. We must accompany this movement to be the best place for every music fan. Fans want to discover, consume and participate in music across multiple content formats, and only YouTube can deliver that entire experience in one place”.

“We just saw this play out with Blackpink’s ‘Pink Venom’ release”, he adds. “Fans went from the music video teaser, to the Shorts challenge, to the livestreamed premiere of the music video, and beyond. Then WOW: ‘Pink Venom’ became the biggest 24 hour music video debut of 2022, and the third largest 24 hour music video debut of all time”. Lovely stuff.

In addition to royalty stats, Cohen’s blog post also further trumpets YouTube’s TikTok rival Shorts, saying that it is now generating over 30 billion views per day. And, he says “we’re creating long-term monetisation solutions for Shorts” promising that there will be “more to share on this soon”.



READ MORE ABOUT: