YouTube said it paid the music industry more than $6 billion between July 2021 and June 2022. That’s his $2 billion increase from the $4 billion the company announced last year.
User-generated content accounted for 30% of payments to artists, songwriters and rights owners, the company said.
Lyor Cohen, global head of music at YouTube, said in a statement: “We continue to focus on being the largest contributor to industry revenue, while creating a connected musical experience across all music formats for fans and artists who enable discovery, consumption and participation. will build.”
In a separate blog post shared on Tuesday, Cohen said he hopes the combination of advertising and subscriptions will be “the largest contributor to the industry’s revenue by 2025,” merging shortform and live. pointed out YouTube’s efforts to monetize across formats, including videos.
YouTube’s advertising business failed to achieve record growth early in the pandemic, but it still generated $7.3 billion in revenue in the second quarter. Last year, YouTube announced that YouTube Music surpassed his 50 million subscribers, including both free and paid users.
YouTube is trying to fix its relationships with artists and rights owners as its music business grows. In August, YouTube, along with Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora and Spotify, reached an agreement with major music publishers to phase up his royalty rate to 15.35% over the next five years. The agreement helped avoid repeated lengthy legal battles between streamers such as Spotify and YouTube and music rights owners who fought over royalty rates in the 2018-2022 period.
