YouTube Music and Premium pass 150 million subscribers. Here is what that does and does not mean for artists

YouTube Music and YouTube Premium now have more than 150 million subscribers worldwide, trials included. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai disclosed the figure in Alphabet's Q3 2026 earnings release on 28 October, and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan marked it on social media (Music Business Worldwide). We could not open Alphabet's release or a YouTube blog post on the milestone today, so the numbers below are as MBW reported them.

The numbers

• 150 million+, including trials. Alphabet does not split YouTube Music from YouTube Premium (MBW).
• Growth has slowed. The count was 100 million in February 2024 and 125 million in March 2025. MBW works out about 1.3 million net additions a month since then, against roughly 2 million a month before.
• Prices went up. In the US, Premium Individual rose from $13.99 to $15.99 a month and Music Individual from $10.99 to $11.99, the first rises since 2023. New subscribers paid the new prices from 10 April and existing ones from their June billing cycle (MBW).
• Subscriptions revenue is growing slower too. Google's subscriptions, platforms and devices line grew 11% year on year to $14.29 billion, after 19% in Q1 and 15% in Q2. YouTube ad revenue rose 9.2% to $11.21 billion (MBW).

Against Spotify

Spotify reported 306 million Premium subscribers at the end of Q3 2026 and expects 316 million by the end of Q4 (MBW). On paper YouTube is at about half of Spotify. In practice the gap in music subscribers is wider, because many Premium subscribers pay mainly to skip video ads, and YouTube does not say how many of the 150 million are there for music.

What it means for artist payouts

The most recent payout number YouTube has given is more than $8 billion to the music industry in the 12 months from July 2024 to July 2025, from ads and subscriptions combined. Spotify said it paid $10 billion in 2024 (TechCrunch). That money goes to labels, publishers and distributors first, not straight to artists.

Subscription money is the steadier half of that engine. Ad money on YouTube is split very differently, especially on Shorts, where a pooled model decides what music earns; we walked through it in how YouTube Shorts actually pays when someone uses your song. For uploads of your music by other people, the route is Content ID, covered in our Content ID explainer for independent artists.

What we think

Read 150 million as a strong number with a soft centre. Strong, because YouTube kept adding subscribers through its first price rise in three years. Soft, because trials are counted, Music and Premium are lumped together, and the pace has dropped from about 2 million a month to about 1.3 million. Our guess is that the price rise pulled in more revenue per subscriber than the slower growth cost, but Alphabet's numbers don't let anyone check that. Treat it as inference, not fact.

For artists, the practical point is that subscriber headlines don't change what you get paid per stream. What matters is whether your releases are properly delivered to YouTube through a distributor that collects on Art Tracks, Content ID claims and Shorts, and whether your Official Artist Channel is set up so views land in one place (how the topic channel merge works). And when YouTube next gives a payout figure, compare it to the $8 billion baseline: if 150 million subscribers is real money, it should show there first.