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In 2015, YouTube hired MOG and Beats Music veteran T. Jay Fowler to oversee the creation of a division that would help define the company’s future: its music team. At the time, YouTube had licenses with all the major and indie labels and publishers to host official music, but it also contained a tangled thicket of user-generated content, live performance videos, cover versions, remixes and fan-made uploads, all monetized through ad-supported streams, leading to a situation of confusion for many users and frustration from the industry at the low payouts that YouTube generated.
With the formation of Fowler’s music team, and the launch of the official YouTube Music service that fall, the company slowly began to change that narrative. “What’s really changed over the last 10 years is us specializing in the journeys that a music user wants,” Fowler, YouTube Music’s senior director of product, tells Billboard. “And we built a scaled subscription business and a global footprint. When I joined, we launched in five countries. Now we’re in every country that YouTube does business, we have a whole team that thinks about growth and retention, and we provide excellent experiences that give users value.”
Now, as YouTube Music turns 10, the company is rolling out a suite of new features surrounding community, playlisting and fandom that it hopes will help differentiate it as it continues to grow through the next 10 years of the streaming era. “The competitive space has matured quite a bit, and I think that has given us the resolve to lean into what makes YouTube uniquely YouTube: the community, the fandom, the catalog,” Fowlers says. “When you start a fandom journey with a hook and a 15-second video, and then we take you to buying tickets and merch, it’s a big win for us.”
The first of those initiatives is around community, specifically commenting — users have always been able to comment on individual videos, but now there will be an additional ability to comment specifically on albums and playlists, broadening the connective tissue for fans on the platform. In terms of playlists, the company is now rolling out what it calls “taste match playlists,” where multiple users can connect on a single playlist that will pull from the musical tastes of each to create a shared playlist that is automatically updated daily.
Another aspect is a new exclusive partnership with Bandsintown, which will expand concert notifications and ticket sales to users in 35 countries, inclusive of small venues, bigger arenas and stadiums, and festivals, with a focus on notifications ahead of time so that fans will be aware when their favorite artists are coming to town. That notification strategy will also expand to new merch drops, new album or single releases and other events nearby.
YouTube Music is also leaning into one of the industry’s favorite buzzwords over the past 18 months — superfans, from both the fandom side and the artist side. The service is rolling out new badges for fans on platform for those who are among the first listeners or viewers for a song or album, for top listeners per artist, and for particular view count milestones — 10,000, or 100,000, or 1 million or more — for fans to boast about on their own pages, and for artists to encourage their early fans to achieve.
“We wanted to make sure that we were doing everything we could to enable the superfan journey,” Fowler says. “We wanted to make sure that there was a bi-directional feeling from artists and fans. There’s a risk that people think of us as a distributor, that we just put music in front of users. But actually, there’s a lot of community going on, and artists are participating at scale on the platform. So we have been investing in tools that celebrate this fandom, and a couple of these are pretty fun.”
What other ways are you looking to monetize fandom?
We’ve seen that merch is really impactful for converting people into consumers on the platform in the moment of watching. So you’ll see these things show up on the watch page. They’ll also show up in your inbox in the app when new merch drops, and then we are exploring everything from channel memberships to paid digital goods to the other ecosystems that we have on the platform. That stuff isn’t necessarily native to artists, but I think it’s a great way to bolster their income on our platform in a way that seems to be working really well for, say, creators or podcasters.
You’ve been at YouTube for 10 years, and you said you created the music team there. What was YouTube’s music strategy prior to that, and how has it evolved?
Back then, largely our music business was ad-supported. And if you think about 10 years ago in the subscription streaming space, it wasn’t yet what it is today. There were superfans and people who were very leaned in; we used to call the people that were paid subscribers “Larry,” and they were roughly 41 years old and male. That was our archetypal user.
What we had here was something that was special, because we had this incredible catalog of this multi dimensional stuff — it’s like the Smithsonian of music history, where you can watch a Johnny Cash performance from the late ’50s, and you can also see Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” video. But it was unorganized, right? We had this amazing archive, but it required a tremendous amount of effort from users to find those gems. If they wanted to find an album, it was really hard because you had to search and then go to playlists, which doesn’t make sense, or you had to sort between the Tiny Desk concert and the official video versus the live version from Saturday Night Live. So just making it super easy for users to go on those journeys. And it’s simple things, like square cover art instead of 16×9 video thumbnails, right?
How has streaming changed over the past 10 years?
Ten years ago, the novelty was just having all-you-can-eat access to the entire catalog. The promise of that waned pretty quickly, because you have that blank search box problem. I think what users then wanted was value from the service. And the industry has shifted in many different directions. It used to be pure social, like when Facebook launched their music.listens API, and it was just this fire hose of what your friends were listening to. And I think we all realized that our friends have not great musical taste. That only scaled so far.
And then I think people started to realize that that they needed a companion, somebody that actually introduced them to the world of music and guided them. And I think that’s where you’re seeing a set of innovative features. We’re doubling down on these, creating collections and contextual entry points so that people know that they’re going to enter a listening experience that’s familiar, that’s full of their favorites, or they’re entering a listening experience where they know it’s going to be adventurous and maybe a little bit dangerous, they’re going to hear things they’ve never heard before, and introducing them to people like them, because people are an important factor of music discovery.
I think that’s the biggest thing that’s changed. The novelty was purely just, you get everything for the price of one CD at the time. And I think people were investing a little bit less. One of the things that I’m excited about, specifically in this fandom journey, is really getting people to see all the dimensions of a recording, whether it’s the full album or if it’s an individual performance, or if it’s a single, or if it’s a premium music video. And I think that’s that’s the stuff that I think is really the foundation of these fandom investments. How do you get people to engage and go deeper and learn more about the artist and become a fan?
So what does the next 10 years of streaming look like?
One of the things that I’m super excited about is the idea of this companion. And I think that with LLMs [large language models] and some of the investment in agentic AI, there’s an opportunity for you to have a conversation with somebody — or a something, I should say — that is an advocate for you, who understands what you like and can provide you the context to go deeper and understand what we’re recommending to you, why we’re recommending it to you, and and to do it in a natural conversational way.
Music has a very distinct vocabulary about how people talk about it, and we have multiple dimensions in how to organize it. And conventional user interfaces today just aren’t conducive to allowing this type of exploration. So let me give you an example. The Beastie Boys book that came out several years ago, where they put that playlist up that was all the samples and all the influences — wouldn’t it be great to have a way to explore Paul’s Boutique where the context that exists, the reference points, the 600 or 700 songs sampled are in a playlist, the right versions, [are all there]?
I think that’s the companion. Or like, “Hey, I don’t know what I want to listen to today.” I think that’s the future, right? It’s a companion. And I’m super excited to see where that goes.
