YouTube has announced it is expanding a pilot of its lower-priced Premium Lite subscription package to include users in the US, with plans to make it available to more users in Thailand, Germany and Australia, where the Lite pilot is already underway.
The big difference between the ‘full Premium’ offering vs Premium Lite is that Lite does not include offline consumption or ad-free music.
In the US, YouTube Premium currently costs $13.99 a month and provides ad-free viewing across the YouTube platform, as well as access to the standalone YouTube Music app and offline consumption, so that users can download videos and music within the YouTube apps and consume them without an internet connection.
The Lite version, without YouTube music, ad-free music videos and offline consumption is $7.99. A standalone YouTube Music subscription is also available at $10.99.
Despite Lite excluding ad-free music, YouTube music boss Lyor Cohen still thinks that the roll out of the lower-priced tier is an opportunity for the music industry.
“This more-affordable subscription gives people a new way to enjoy most videos on YouTube ad-free”, Cohen explains in a typically bullish blog post, before adding the small print that Lite users may still see ads “on music content and Shorts, and as they search and browse”.
However, the roll out of Lite should “benefit our partners” in the music industry, Cohen reckons, because “in our early pilots, we saw that more Lite members upgraded to YouTube Premium than Premium members downgraded to Premium Lite”.
Although there were a few false starts, YouTube’s move into offering premium subscriptions and a standalone paid-for music service both diversified the company’s own revenues and helped placate a music industry that, for a time in the 2010s, started portraying YouTube as enemy number one.
Today YouTube is generally seen as a valuable partner for the music industry, even if - for artists and songwriters, and many indie labels and publishers - it’s tricky to work out how exactly the various different uses of music on the YouTube platform pay out.
The introduction of a premium package without ad-free music raises new questions for those music creators and indies. Presumably music won't share in that income, instead getting a cut of ad revenue if and when those users watch music videos. Although - as always - there’s very little clarity on all that.
The roll out of Lite into the US comes as YouTube passes 125 million paying subscribers across YouTube Premium and YouTube Music (assuming you include those subscribers still on a trial). That, brags Cohen in his blog post, is “an incredible milestone that many laughed off as impossible when we first launched”.
“This momentum is critical to our goal of becoming the number one contributor of revenue” to the music industry, he adds. And, despite ad-free music being the main exclusion from Lite, Cohen is adamant “we won’t stop until we get there”.
In a separate blog post about the Lite pilot expansion, YouTube Premium’s Director Of Product Management Jack Greenberg says, “We’ve been testing Premium Lite to make sure we have the right balance of features and benefits for those viewers who want to watch most videos ad-free - whether it’s gaming, comedy, cooking or learning”.
“With Premium Lite, users can enjoy their favourite content with fewer interruptions”, he adds, concluding, “we’ll continue to expand our Premium Lite pilots to additional countries this year and introduce more ways for our users to get the most from their subscriptions”.