YouTube Music and Premium Soar to 80 Million-Plus Paid Subscribers (EXCLUSIVE)

In a remarkably rapid growth surge, YouTube’s Music and Premium services now have more than 80 million paying subscribers combined, a rep informs Variety — up a whopping 30 million from the 50 million the company announced in September of last year. It’s a dramatic leap, especially for a platform where so much can be had for free, and would seem to place YouTube — which is already the No. 1 overall streaming platform for music worldwide — as the world’s third or fourth-largest paid music-streaming service, behind Spotify, Apple Music and China-only Tencent, although such rankings are always piled with asterisks (such as whether or not free trials are included in the tally; YouTube includes them, which not all services do). Yet by any measure, the growth is remarkable and comes in tandem with a years-long charm offensive aimed at creators and the music industry. After a couple of false starts, YouTube Music and Premium launched their subscription services in earnest in 2018, around 18 months after music chief Lyor Cohen joined the company, following his many years in C-suite positions at Def Jam Records and Warner Music, as well as 300 Entertainment (which he co-founded and was sold
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