Lyor Cohen, Head Of Music at YouTube announced today that the company paid out $6 billion to rights holder and creators.
Last year YouTube announced $4B was paid out to the music industry, and this year The former executive at Def Jam Records says “our foot is still planted on the gas pedal: In the 12 months between July 2021 and June 2022, YouTube paid over $6B to the music industry. This is a $2B increase from the $4B contribution we announced in 2021.”
Lyor say YouTube’s mission is to make their ads and subscriptions model the #1 contributor of revenue to the industry by 2025.
Previously shorts were not monetized but as of today, YouTube is monetizing all music formats (short & long form video, audio tracks, live, etc.), on all platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile, and TV), in over 100 countries.
Announcements made by Cohen in his newsletter stated:
“UGC(User Generated Content) drove over 30% of payouts for artists, songwriters, and rights-holders, for the second year in a row.”
“Shorts generates 30 billion views per day, with 1.5 billion monthly logged-in users – and we’re just getting started. In addition to our $100M Shorts Fund, we’re creating long-term monetization solutions for Shorts, and we’ll have more to share on this soon.”
YouTube is the largest music platform in the world with over 2.3 billion users and one of the largest social media platforms, second only to Facebook, according to Statista.
Artists and labels have often decried the service’s royalty rates, typically far lower than those offered by Spotify or Apple Music; YouTube’s defenders argue it’s still an improvement over radio, which has historically paid recording artists nothing, compensating songwriters only.
In 2018 when Cohen joined YouTube, he hit the ground running with one of largest advertising campaigns in its history, with the goal of converting more of its massive video audience into paid subscribers for YouTube Music (at $10 per month) and YouTube Premium (a couple dollars more for additional video content), replacing YouTube Red.
Jamaica & YouTube
Over the last year, Jamaica saw more artists than ever moving from obscurity to celebrity and commanding more than $50,000 per show from their YouTube hits.
Skeng, who scored several Jamaican YouTube hits recently scored a collab with Nicki Minaj due to the success on his songs Protocol and Gvman Shift which are the top two YouTube songs in Jamaica. Skeng is also the No. 1 YouTube artist in Jamaica over the last year with 100 million streams across his catalogue.
Skeng told World Music Views exclusively that working with the Queen New York MC is a blessing.
He said, “Nicki Minaj and Skeng Likkle Miss Remix is a good look. Is not everybody weh me meet pon dah music journey yah who show interest or believe inah me. Me try only give my energy to the ones who show the truth.”
“Working with Nicky is an achievement and a blessing. Dancehall active you see it,” he continued.
The young deejay came on the music scene only last July and is already the second most streamed YouTube artist in Jamaica over the past year. The 21 year old holds the record for the two most streamed songs in the Island of all time. Protocol (13,765,028) & Gvman Shift(11,501,085). He is currently an independent artist, but he signed a publishing deal with with Geejam Music recently.
