\t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tYoutube music badges<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Photo<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tWhat other ways are you looking to monetize fandom?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tWe\u2019ve seen that merch is really impactful for converting people into consumers on the platform in the moment of watching. So you\u2019ll see these things show up on the watch page. They\u2019ll 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\u2019t necessarily native to artists, but I think it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tYou\u2019ve been at YouTube for 10 years, and you said you created the music team there. What was YouTube\u2019s music strategy prior to that, and how has it evolved?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tBack then, largely our music business was ad-supported. And if you think about 10 years ago in the subscription streaming space, it wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cLarry,\u201d and they were roughly 41 years old and male. That was our archetypal user.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhat we had here was something that was special, because we had this incredible catalog of this multi dimensional stuff \u2014 it\u2019s like the Smithsonian of music history, where you can watch a Johnny Cash performance from the late \u201950s, and you can also see Lady Gaga\u2019s \u201cPoker Face\u201d 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\u2019t make sense, or you had to sort between the Tiny Desk concert and the official video versus the live version from Saturday Night Live<\/em>. So just making it super easy for users to go on those journeys. And it\u2019s simple things, like square cover art instead of 16\u00d79 video thumbnails, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHow has streaming changed over the past 10 years?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tTen 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAnd 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\u2019s where you\u2019re seeing a set of innovative features. We\u2019re doubling down on these, creating collections and contextual entry points so that people know that they\u2019re going to enter a listening experience that\u2019s familiar, that\u2019s full of their favorites, or they\u2019re entering a listening experience where they know it\u2019s going to be adventurous and maybe a little bit dangerous, they\u2019re going to hear things they\u2019ve never heard before, and introducing them to people like them, because people are an important factor of music discovery.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tI think that\u2019s the biggest thing that\u2019s 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\u2019m excited about, specifically in this fandom journey, is really getting people to see all the dimensions of a recording, whether it\u2019s the full album or if it\u2019s an individual performance, or if it\u2019s a single, or if it\u2019s a premium music video. And I think that\u2019s that\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n \n\tSo what does the next 10 years of streaming look like?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tOne of the things that I\u2019m 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\u2019s an opportunity for you to have a conversation with somebody \u2014 or a something, I should say \u2014 that is an advocate for you, who understands what you like and can provide you the context to go deeper and understand what we\u2019re recommending to you, why we\u2019re recommending it to you, and and to do it in a natural conversational way.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tMusic 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 wouldn\u2019t it be great to have a way to explore Paul\u2019s Boutique<\/em> where the context that exists, the reference points, the 600 or 700 songs sampled are in a playlist, the right versions, [are all there]?\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tI think that\u2019s the companion. Or like, \u201cHey, I don\u2019t know what I want to listen to today.\u201d I think that\u2019s the future, right? It\u2019s a companion. And I\u2019m super excited to see where that goes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.billboard.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1972621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[23844],"class_list":["post-1972620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-youtube"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/New-Features-Fandom-the-Future-of-Streaming.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1972620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1972621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1972620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1972620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1972620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Youtube](\"https:\/\/www.billboard.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/YTM-blog-post-Badges-billboard-1800.jpg?w=300\")
<\/p><\/div><\/div>