In its 20th anniversary year, YouTube has confirmed crossing the 125 million premium subscribers milestone on YouTube Music and YouTube Premium tiers. This marks an increase of about 25 million subscribers in the past year, following the announcement of reaching 100 million subscribers in February 2024.

According to the blog post announcing the milestone, YouTube’s music head Lyor Cohen emphasised the company’s commitment to further improving the music space for fans, artists and other stakeholders. “This momentum is critical to our goal of becoming the No. 1 contributor of revenue to the industry, and we won’t stop until we get there,” Cohen wrote.

Cohen also hinted at YouTube’s renewed focus on music videos, describing it as “a renaissance of the music video.” He explained that this shift would rely less on big budgets and more on “sharing authentic hero content that music fans can’t unsee.”

Additionally, Cohen highlighted YouTube’s use of AI tools to empower fans and artists to create video clips for Shorts. This includes the recently announced integration of Google’s Veo and DeepMind models. “With this new integration, artists and fans can create standalone video clips for their Shorts, broadening the horizons to tell visual stories with music,” he continued.

Since it was founded in February 2005, YouTube has grown into one of the most important digital communities for a diverse range of everyday uses, with a presence in over 100 countries and support for 80 languages.

In February 25, the company announced hitting one billion monthly active viewers for podcast content on its platform. This milestone solidifies YouTube’s dominance in the podcast space, positioning it ahead of competitors like Spotify and Apple, which primarily focus on audio-only podcasts.