Here We Go Again, YouTube Premium & Google Music Up Rate

In a un-surprising turn of events, 9to5 Google broke the news that Google’s streaming options will soon be costing consumers more.

According to a YouTube spokesperson, they belove the price hike is fair.

“We believe this new price reflects the value of YouTube Premium which allows subscribers to enjoy ad-free YouTube with background and offline play and uninterrupted access to over 100M songs with the YouTube Music app,” they wrote.

In the U.S. for new and current customers, the pricing for YouTube Premium will be going up $2 to $13.99 with the annual subscription rate increasing $20 to $140.

For the standalone subscription to YouTube Music (which comes with YouTube Premium), the rate is going up by a dollar to $11 a month.

If you’ve been reading Channel News, you’d see that Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal have all increased their cost to the same rate with only Spotify not falling in line and still being a dollar less than all three.

If consumers have a family subscription to YouTube Premium, luckily the pricing for that package won’t increase again but that’s only because it increased by $5 in October 2022.

This particular increase was attributed to supporting the artistic community and that it would “allow us to develop even more Premium features and continue to support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube.”

If you’re using YouTube on iOS, consumers do have the bonus of streaming 1080p videos at a higher bitrate which we’ll take as a win.

The entire point of YouTube Premium is to live add free in the app, and although the increase won’t be welcome for users, the prince increase is in line with what we’re seeing across the market.