Yesterday was a busy day for YouTube as the platform held its ‘Made on YouTube 2025’ event to announce new product features – and a sizeable milestone.
“Over the last four years, we’ve paid out over $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies,” said CEO Neal Mohan in his introduction to the event. Among the speakers from YouTube was music boss Lyor Cohen, to talk about new features for artists.
“We’re introducing new ways for artists and their top fans to connect on a more personal level. It’s about rewarding loyalty for those who were there from day one,” said Cohen.
Exclusive mech drops for top listeners; new-release countdowns and album pre-saves; and exclusive videos sent directly to superfans are among the new additions, with Dua Lipa joining Cohen to announce them. This blog post rounds them up.
Adjacent to music, other things announced yesterday included rolling out a version of Google’s Veo 3 video AI for YouTube Shorts – it’s called Veo 3 Fast and is launching in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand initially.
YouTube is also deploying the Lyria 2 music-AI for a new feature called ‘Speech to Song’, which turns spoken dialogue from videos into music soundtracks for Shorts.
Livestreaming is getting some upgrades: games, simultaneous horizontal and vertical-format broadcasts; and a new “less-intrusive” ad format. YouTube will also make it easier to segue from public livestreams to ‘members-only’ streams for paying fans.
YouTube also announced an expansion off its ‘likeness detection’ tool as an open beta to anyone whose channel is in YouTube’s Partner Program. It helps those creators crack down on “unauthorized videos made with your facial likeness” using AI.
It all made for an impressive statement of intent, even if some of the music features – countdowns and pre-saves – are just catching up to rivals. But the exclusive merch and video drops signify YouTube’s increased focus on superfans, as do the members-only livestreams.
Much of the debate around superfans and streaming services this year has focused on the likely launch of more-expensive subscription tiers: Spotify’s rumoured ‘Music Pro’ offering for example.
YouTube and YouTube Music’s strategy seems different. Rather than a brand new service-wide tier, its superfans focus seems to be on creator and artist-level memberships.
That means adding features for those people to super-serve fans who are paying, but also those who are the most engaged with their work. It seems like a positive approach.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
