A whopping $16.9 billion of the total revenue of $25.9 billion in the global recorded music market alone (not counting the publishing business) came from streaming in 2021.

How much money is distributed by the services to the music industry can only be broken down in a few cases.

Benjamin Fisher

Editor in Business.

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It's relatively easy in the case of Spotify.

The market leader is listed on the stock exchange and thus provides reliable quarterly information on sales, user numbers and other key figures.

From here, Spotify's contribution is not difficult to calculate.

All services pay around two-thirds of their total revenue to the music industry.

This sum includes license payments for the rights to recordings and the underlying texts and compositions;

The latter generally account for around 20 percent, with 80 percent going to the side of the recording.

In 2021, Spotify paid out more than $7 billion to a wide variety of rights holders for the more than 70 million songs represented on the platform.

The service also published the number on its “Loud & Clear” data page at the end of March.

The Swedish service had 188 million paying users at the end of the second quarter.

Apple and Amazon remain silent

Far away from Spotify it gets more difficult.

The smaller French service Deezer went public in Paris in July, so there will be more insights in the future.

With figures for Apple and Amazon Music, however, the two tech giants are deliberately reticent.

Music services are primarily seen as part of the overall ecosystem.

As a result, they are silent about individual distributions, the latest subscriber numbers for Apple Music are from June 2019 (more than 60 million).

At the beginning of 2020, Amazon declared that it had around 55 million users - including the limited free offer compared to Spotify's.

Youtube, on the other hand, has got used to reporting regularly at least on the distributions to the music industry.

In September 2021, the Google subsidiary also announced that it had more than 50 million paying YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscribers.

At 11.99 euros per month, the latter is two euros more expensive than the usual music subscription and also allows you to watch videos without advertising.

With a view to the distributions, there was now an update on Tuesday afternoon German time: it was more than 6 billion dollars in the 12 months from July 2021 to the end of June 2022, Google's music director Lyor Cohen wrote in a blog post.

Two billion more than in the 12 months before.

According to Spotify, it was worth more than 5 billion dollars in 2020.

So both paid out around two billion more.

Youtube wants to pay out more than Spotify by 2025

By 2025, YouTube should replace the Swedish service as the largest single source of income for the music industry, according to the goal formulated by Cohen.

The New Yorker joined Google in the summer of 2016.

He had previously managed the renowned Universal Music label Def Jam and later at Warner Music was responsible for the entire label business of the third largest music group in the world.

With Google as an investor, he also founded the music company 300 Entertainment in 2012, which Warner took over at the end of 2021 for around $300 million.

Of course, Cohen has an advantage over Spotify on the way to the stated goal, which makes a direct comparison difficult.

In addition to the subscription model, there is also the video portal YouTube itself, which users can use free of charge with advertising breaks.

Cohen calls the two streams of income “twin engine growth engine” – and as before, around 30 percent of the 6 billion came from user-generated content on YouTube.

"Greatest beacon of hope in the music industry"

The days of hard confrontation may be over, but there are still voices from the music industry calling for a higher share of the video platform's huge advertising pie.

In 2021, advertising sales amounted to $28.8 billion, after $19.8 billion in 2020. With a view to calls for a higher share for the music industry, Cohen said simply a year ago in an interview with the FAZ: “That only means that we as the music industry need to do even better work and bring even more fans to YouTube.”

In any case, he is not lacking in self-confidence: "There was a time when we were the most feared player of all and now the industry sees us as the greatest hope," he said in September 2021. The time that users on the video platform with the Watching music content has increased year-on-year, he writes in the current blog post, without going into details.

In addition, the Google manager refers to the in-house Tiktok competitor, Shorts.

As of April this year, this comes from 1.5 billion monthly registered users.

YouTube monetizes music in all formats, "short and long videos, audio tracks, live and more".