YouTube paid $6bn to music industry
September 15, 2022
By Chris Forrester
YouTube has reported that it paid out over $6 billion (€6bn) to the music industry in the year to June 2022, a rise of 50 per cent over the previous year. The cash was made up from a mix of ad-revenues and subscription income.
Lyor Cohen, Global Head of Music at Google & YouTube announced the news in a blog post.
YouTube plans to be ‘the #1 contributor of revenue to the industry by 2025’. Time watched on music content across devices grew Y-o-Y (despite the pandemic now receding). User Generated Content drove over 30 per cent of pay-outs for artists, songwriters and rights holders for the year in succession.
Investment bank Exane/BNPP says the update from YouTube underpins the importance of the service in driving monetisation for labels and artists, now rivalling Spotify in pay-outs (Nasdaq ‘SPOT’ at >$7 billion in 2021 although there may well be methodological differences).
“We note that the Country Music Association highlighted YouTube’s healthy monetisation in their recent market study which is a contrast to historical concerns around the value gap.”
“Yesterday Sir Lucian Grange (chair/CEO Universal Music Group) gave an upbeat update on UMG’s progress since listing. That said, in the context of the macro backdrop, a potential slowdown in YouTube’s revenue growth bring risks to UMG’s outlook, even if we expect music subscription revenue to prove relatively defensive to any economic slowdown (exhaustive content, penetration, price point etc),” adds the bank’s note.