125 Million Music & Premium Subscribers, Lite Launched in US

YouTube, the world’s biggest video platform, touted a new milestone: It now has more than 125 million subscribers worldwide for YouTube Music and Premium, up from 100 million just a year ago.

In addition, YouTube announced the expansion of its Premium Lite pilot to users in the U.S., priced at $7.99 per month (versus $13.99/month for YouTube Premium and $10.99/month for YouTube Music). The Premium Lite plan provides ad-free video viewing but excludes songs and music videos; it also does not let users download videos for offline viewing or play videos in the background. In the coming weeks, in addition to the U.S., YouTube will launch Premium Lite for all users in its current pilot countries: Thailand, Germany and Australia.

“Since launching YouTube Music and Premium, we’ve focused on giving subscribers a variety of ways to enjoy their favorite content, and Premium Lite is the latest step in that evolution,” Jack Greenberg, director of product management for YouTube Premium, wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “YouTube Music and Premium, and the expansion of Premium Lite, also continue to create additional revenue opportunities for our creators and partners.”

YouTube has been testing Premium Lite “to make sure we have the right balance of features and benefits for those viewers who want to watch most videos ad-free,” Greenberg added.

In YouTube’s early pilots, the company found that more Premium Lite members upgraded to Premium than Premium members who downgraded to Lite, according to Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music.

The 125 million subscriber figure includes users on free trial plans. Cohen, in a blog post, called it “an incredible milestone that many laughed off as impossible when we first launched.”

“This momentum is critical to our goal of becoming the No. 1 contributor of revenue to the [music] industry, and we won’t stop until we get there,” Cohen wrote.

Looking ahead, Cohen predicted “a renaissance of the music video.” “It’s not about having the biggest production budget; it’s about sharing authentic hero content that music fans can’t unsee. It’s about using the artist’s most influential asset — the music video — and cutting through the tidal wave of clutter and choice,” he wrote.

Cohen also heralded the “potential of AI” to make it easier for music artists and fans to create new kinds of videos. YouTube is “investing heavily in AI tools,” he wrote, including Dream Screen, which generates images and video backgrounds for YouTube Shorts. Dream Screen is now powered by Veo 2, Google DeepMind’s newest generative video model.

Cohen posted a YouTube Shorts video celebrating the 125 million-subscriber milestone, featuring the exec dancing to Shaboozey’s hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”:

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