It was an unusual picture for the Google group, which has been used to success: YouTube's advertising sales shrank in the past quarter, albeit "only" by two percent to a still impressive 7.1 billion dollars compared to many competitors.

One reason for this is not least the advertising market, which has become more difficult overall.

Benjamin Fisher

Editor in Business.

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Youtube is now reporting more positive news for its subscription business.

According to its own statements, the service has since September more than 80 million paying users (including trial subscriptions), the pure music streaming service and the YouTube Premium offer together.

With the subscription, which is two euros more expensive for a single user at 11.99 euros per month, all videos on YouTube can be viewed ad-free, among other things.

Google's music director Lyor Cohen did not say in his blog post how many subscribers fall on which model.

The new value represents a considerable improvement over the last known figure.

At the beginning of September 2021, Cohen announced that YouTube had "more than 50 million music and premium subscribers", including users in the test phase.

For comparison, Spotify had 172 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter of 2021 and now has 195 million as of the end of September 2022.

The market leader is also the only major global service that provides quarterly user and subscription numbers.

The most recent numbers for Apple Music are from June 2019 (more than 60 million).

Amazon, in turn, declared at the beginning of 2020 that it had around 55 million users across the various offers.

Both regularly only provide information about the development of their subscription services as a whole.

Amazon soon ahead of Apple number two?

It is therefore difficult to say exactly how the distances behind Spotify are.

However, according to Mark Mulligan, industry expert at British consultancy Midia Research, Amazon is likely to overtake Apple as number two over the next 12 months, "probably sooner," Mulligan recently wrote on his blog.

Amazon announced last week that it would be making its music service's entire 100-million-song music catalog available to subscribers to its Prime customer loyalty program at no extra charge and without commercial breaks.

However, the titles are only audible in random playback (shuffle mode) with the exception of the songs in playlists of 15 to 50 songs.

In contrast to the subscription service, hi-fi quality is also not available.

The move came just days after Apple became the first major global service to move away from the established price point of 9.99.

Since then, a single subscription to Apple Music has cost EUR 10.99.

A step that until now only the smaller French service Deezer had taken in large markets.