YouTube Premium and YouTube Music now have a combined subscriber base of 80 million people, Variety is reporting today. This is 30 million more subscribers compared to the 50 million number YouTube announced back in September 2021.

YouTube doesn’t detail how many subscribers it has for YouTube Music Premium ($9.99/month), which only provides access to YouTube Music benefits, and YouTube Premium ($11.99/month), which includes YouTube Music Premium benefits plus an ad-free experience, offline listening, and other YouTube perks. The YouTube Premium individual plan is much better value, though Google just raised the price of its YouTube Premium Family plan from $17.99 to $22.99.

It certainly took some time for YouTube to figure out how to effectively compete with Spotify, Amazon Music, and other music streaming services, but the current strategy seems to be working. YouTube Music lets users create playlists that combine official tracks, YouTube videos, as well personal music files that can be uploaded to YouTube Music for free. This is a pretty unique offering in the music streaming market, and if you watch a lot of videos on YouTube as well, you can definitely get lot of value from a YouTube Premium subscription.

The competing music streaming services have tried different things to differentiate themselves: Apple Music is betting on Dolby Atmos spatial audio and social features, while Spotify went all in on podcasts. The latter remains the market leader with 188 million paid subscribers and 433 million monthly active users as of July 2022.

Tagged with YouTube, YouTube Music, YouTube Premium