YouTube has signed up more than 50 million paid subscribers to its music service, a major milestone for Google’s video site that has long been criticised by record labels and Hollywood studios for giving away their work for free.
That 50 million figure includes people paying for YouTube Music, customers for YouTube Premium, who get music as part of their subscription, as well as customers still on a trial basis. The company didn’t disclose how much revenue it was generating from its subscriptions, nor the average price the users paid.
Google has experimented with charging for music for the last decade, cycling through several different products and names without much success. But the performance of the current music service, rolled out in June 2018, suggests YouTube has finally figured out how to persuade many of its customers to pay for music. YouTube is the fastest-growing paid music service in the world, according to Midia Research, and now accounts for about 8 percent of the world’s subscribers. Spotify is first by a wide margin.
That’s encouraging news for investors in…
