If you’re serious about building a music career in 2025, you need to understand one thing clearly: YouTube crushes Spotify in nearly every category that matters to artists — reach, revenue, creative freedom, and long-term sustainability.
Table of Contents
YouTube Has 4X the Music Audience
- 2 billion users per month listen to music on YouTube.
- Spotify? Around 500 million users total — including free listeners and non-music users.
- YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. Fans don’t just stream — they search, discover, and connect visually.
Most people experience new music first on YouTube — not Spotify. If you’re not there, you’re invisible to half the world.
YouTube Pays More — And Pays You Directly
- YouTube: Pays $0.006–$0.0084 per ad-supported stream. YouTube Music Premium pays even more.
- Spotify: Pays $0.003–$0.005 depending on subscription tier and country.
- On YouTube, you control your monetization. You can earn directly from your own channel, and from other people’s videos using your music.
- Spotify takes the scenic route: your revenue goes through a distributor or label first — and they take a cut.
YouTube lets you earn from every video with your song — not just your official uploads.
One Song = 100 Revenue Streams
YouTube is the only platform where one song can earn you money from hundreds of videos.
- Create lyric videos, visualizers, vlogs, beat breakdowns, or live sessions — all monetizable.
- Fans, creators, and YouTubers using your song in their content? You get paid.
- That same song on Spotify only generates revenue from your own uploads.
YouTube = Culture. Spotify = Catalog
- YouTube has community. Comments, subscriptions, likes, reactions — it’s an ecosystem.
- Spotify is a consumption engine. There’s no conversation. No creator visibility unless you’re already famous.
- YouTube is built for visuals — music lives better when seen and heard.
Music is more than sound. It’s identity, image, energy — all of which YouTube supports natively.
Spotify Punishes Independence. YouTube Rewards It.
- Spotify regularly cracks down on independent marketers, playlist curators, and third-party tools.
- YouTube welcomes independent content creators — and shares the revenue with them.
- On Spotify, indie artists struggle to break through without playlisting. On YouTube, smart content wins every time.
Final Takeaway
If you’re an artist focused on growth, visibility, and income, YouTube should be your foundation.
- 4X the audience
- 2X the payout
- Monetize everything — not just your uploads
- Own your relationship with fans
Want help building your YouTube presence?