Why YouTube is the streaming service to watch

Spotify often gets contrasted with Bandcamp in order to explain the challenges of the music streaming landscape: low per-stream royalties versus much larger commissions on sales. The intensity of that discussion has moved all eyes from the actual one-to-watch, which is not Spotify, but YouTube – a service with a billion monthly active music listeners and 30 million subscribers.

Always has been

YouTube has of course long been on everyone’s radar due to the so-called ‘value gap’: the disparity between what YouTube was willing to pay for music & its perceived real market value. As the biggest music platform, YouTube was infamous for its low per-stream rates which, on average, are significantly lower than Spotify’s for music identified through its ContentID system (source). I chose to phrase things in past tense due to attention shifting to Spotify, but that does not mean rightsholders have found these issues to have been resolved.

Another concern is the power of YouTube and its mother companies Google and Alphabet, which is a common reason for complaints from music industry lobbyists about having imbalanced negotiations. Before I go into why I think YouTube is making all the right moves: the concentration of power towards tech monopolies is of big concern for me too (it’s why I deleted or deactivated my accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). Keep this in mind when developing a strategy: always diversify, never put your eggs in one basket, and make sure you create ways to go direct-to-fan (e.g. collect phone numbers, email addresses, build communities).

YouTube’s evolution as a creator service

Google’s video service has long had something of great strategic value: not music. I mean that literally: it’s had content and creators that were not doing music. This has meant less complexities around licensing (but also poorer representation for creatives) and has allowed YouTube to experiment with new models.

The same is happening now with podcasts at Spotify and user-centric streaming payments at SoundCloud. Having ‘user-generated content’ from unsigned artists allowed SoundCloud to start trialing its ‘fan-powered royalty‘ model without every rightsholder having to opt-in through contract negotiations. Meanwhile Spotify is exploring new monetization models around podcasts, like paid podcast subscriptions. As a relatively new medium, podcasts don’t yet have the legal and political complexities associated with intellectual property in music.

YouTube & the next layer

Streaming is a base layer for music monetization. It’s shallow in that it leverages nothing but the relation between listener and catalogue. Monetization is driven by factors like accessibility (e.g. all devices, price), portability (e.g. offline) and convenience (e.g. catalogue size, search, recommendations). It’s absolutely basic: it’s not about the relation between fan and artist, it’s not about the quality of the art or music, it’s just about having the largest and most convenient store where you can access everything by paying from a magic wallet with your costs predictably capped at $10 per month. It’s a subscription business, not a music business – as Tim Westergren (founder of Pandora and now livestreaming service Sessions) also pointed out in my recent interview with him during Karajan Music Tech.

This base layer has advantages: it generates a huge amount of money for rightsholders and creates a foundational data layer which can be used to connect listeners to new artists and music or could be leveraged to learn more about existing fans and get new music to them. But streaming was never supposed to be the future of the music economy. It needs additional layers on top.

One of these layers is the Interaction Layer. This layer has been thriving during the pandemic thanks to a particular medium: livestreams. Livestreams encourage interactivity: fans can be exposed to each other in chats and the chat functionality can make fans feel like they’re seen by the artist(s) they care about so much. That means there’s value being created beyond simple music access. Value means opportunity to monetize and YouTube has seized that opportunity.

Image taken from my Water & Music piece about fan-centric streaming services (paywall).

Through its Super Sticker and Super Chat features, YouTube allows creators to monetize their livestreams. Super Stickers are big, fun and quirky custom emoji that appear in the chat in exchange for a small fee. Super Chat allows viewers to highlight and pin a message for a certain duration of time, depending on how much they pay. In the first months of the pandemic lockdowns, from March to June 2020, over 2 million new users spent money on these features.

The second feature that provides an additional layer is channel memberships. This allows creators to created limited edition content, similar to what they might offer on Patreon or a SFW OnlyFans. At smaller numbers, it even allows them to create semi-bespoke content.

Layer integration

These features allow creators to monetize and connect with fans where they already are: YouTube (as opposed to onboarding them to Patreon or OnlyFans). This is the important distinction. These monetization options are not novel in and of themselves – many of them have been around for years or even decades. The important development is that these experience and monetization layers are integrating. Moving fans around various platforms causes friction, which means you won’t be able to convert everyone down the funnel from the streaming layer. It also keeps the data in one place instead of fracturing it.

Graphic from Streaming is not the future of the music economy, from the second edition of the MUSIC x newsletter, February 2016.

Over the next years we’re going to see many examples of artists successfully building models on layers that sit on top of streaming. YouTube is going to play a significant role in that. The conversation will move from leveraging streaming (still essential for discovery & connection to wider audience) to interaction & bespoke options.

Another service to watch in this space is Amazon Music, which is slowly expanding their integration of livestreams from Twitch (another Amazon company, which also allows micropayments and memberships like YouTube).

Livestreams mean original content and a different set of rights than what you negotiate for on-demand streaming. This has given YouTube and Amazon the flexibility to experiment with these new layers. Spotify’s business strategy has introduced similar functionality to podcasts, but will they be able to do the same for music given the complexities of licensing and the various rightsholders that will want a piece of the pie?

The music streaming landscape is in flux and it’s not about Apple Music vs Spotify or Spotify vs Bandcamp anymore.

For a wider read diving further into this trend, read my article The rise of the fan-centric music streaming service at Water & Music (paywall).

A special thanks to Vickie Nauman for some of the inspiration for this piece and to c/o pop and Germany’s association for independent music (VUT) for having us on a panel last week.