YouTube, the world's biggest music streaming site, says it paid the music business $6 billion between July 2021 and June 2022, $2 billion more than in the previous year.
While brief, the piece outlines several relevant elements. "We want advertisements and subscriptions to be the industry's top income generator by 2025," Cohen stated
He continued, "We pioneered the monetization of user-generated content (UGC), which we knew could become a powerful engine for the industry: UGC drove over 30% of payouts for artists,
songwriters, and rights-holders, for the second year in a row; Shorts generates 30 billion daily views, with 1.5 billion monthly logged-in users."
Despite these large figures, music industry trade organisations and others have criticised YouTube's royalties structure for lack of transparency and inadequate payouts.
Billboard reports that YouTube's rights-management system is "full of flaws" and "ripe for misuse," citing anonymous sources.