On the recent Google earnings release for the first time, Google released information about Google Play Music and YouTube TV numbers. Google Play Music has 20 million paying subscribers, but it is important to realize that YouTube Premium is included in these numbers. YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music and YouTube ad-free service.
The reason this is important is that when you look at these numbers these 20 million Google Play Music subscribers are a combination of three services that Google offers. What this means is Google’s music services like YouTube & Google Music and YouTube ad-free service are not a huge hit with Google fanbase.
My wife does not use Google Play Music but uses YouTube Premium which included YouTube Music and YouTube Ad-free while I use Google Music and YouTube ad-free. But 20 million is a small number for three services when you consider Apple has 60 million Apple Music customers and Spotify has 120 million subscribers.
Google Play Music started out as a music service you could just upload your music to powered by Google Search to help organize your music library. The Google turn Google Play Music into a full-fledged music service. But even with the addition of YouTube Music and YouTube ad-free has only helped Google get a small piece of the music market. On another note, YouTube earns 15 billion in ad revenue a year so YouTube users do not care about watching ads before videos.
YouTube Music has even started adding some of Google Play Music’s most popular features in an attempt to grow the userbase but that has not moved the needle at all. YouTube Ad-free has not even enticed users to sign up and use the music service. While I think this shows how Google has next to no market share in the music industry and even bundling services together is not helping which is a shame because Google Play Music is such a great service.