YouTube Premium Lite is becoming available to a number of users in the U.S. Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema
As it expands Premium Lite to the U.S., YouTube has confirmed a combined total of over 125 million global subscribers for Music and Premium.
The video-sharing giant disclosed the subscribership figure today, when announcing the stateside availability of a Premium Lite pilot.
Already being tested in Thailand, Germany, and Australia (where it’ll soon become available to all users), Premium Lite provides ad-free access to a variety of non-Shorts content.
However, said content expressly excludes music, which is available sans ads via the $13.99-per-month Premium offering. (Though that includes YouTube Music Premium, the latter has a standalone $10.99-per-month subscription option as well.)
As we previously noted, YouTube’s effort to more effectively monetize non-music uploads has arrived against the backdrop of continued video-podcast success. Despite stiff competition from rivals such as Spotify, the Google-owned service now finds itself atop the podcasting mountain.
Last month, for instance, YouTube took a victory lap by proclaiming that approximately 12% of the world’s population had accessed on-platform “podcast content” in January. Unsurprisingly, the same type of media is driving multiple forms of growth for the company, which in February acknowledged TV as its foremost consumption format in the States.
In other words, there’s certainly a path to heightened YouTube subscription revenue via Premium Lite, which doesn’t support downloads or background viewing, and it’ll be worth following its showing moving forward. (The tier’s pilot will reach “additional countries this year,” YouTube also confirmed.)
As for the commercial positioning of YouTube Music and Premium, the initially mentioned total of 125 million subscribers includes trials and is up from 100 million in January 2024. But as charted by DMN Pro’s market-share tracker, most of these subscribers are based outside the U.S.
Stateside, YouTube Music and Premium had a comparatively modest 9.01 million or so subscribers (not straight subscriptions) as of September 2024 – with another update forthcoming.
Put differently, Premium Lite, especially given its price point, could prove appealing to consumers. (Not helping the situation – for YouTube, that is – are Premium’s varying prices by market. One needn’t look hard on Premium’s Reddit community to find discussions about utilizing lower-cost plans regardless of location.)
Notably, even with its clear-cut subscriber lead in the U.S., Spotify is looking more like YouTube with each passing day. Non-music and -podcast video compilations are abundant, many of the uploads’ comments sections are well-populated, and it doesn’t appear as though the aggressive video embrace will subside anytime soon.
Content shared from www.digitalmusicnews.com.