Lyor Cohen, global head of music for YouTube and Google, and Diane Warren, songwriter extraordinaire, took the stage of the Musikaliska Kvarteret theater in Stockholm on Monday (May 23) to be interviewed by Swedish journalist Jan Gradvall. Their appearance was part of the Polar Talks, a day of conversations annually based on the theme “the power of music,” according to Marie Ledin, managing director of Sweden's Polar Music Prize. The Prize was founded by her father, ABBA manager Stig Anderson,...
YouTube, LLC
Lyor
Cohen
Global Head, Music
Even when Cohen was a young label exec, he was known to set lofty goals, so it’s no surprise he’s pledged that by 2025 YouTube will be the music industry’s No. 1 revenue source. In service to that, the company announced in September that it paid more than $6 billion to the industry from July 2021 through June 2022, $2 billion more than it did a year earlier. YouTube now monetizes all music formats — including the surging year-old Shorts offering — on all platforms in more than 100 countries. In November, the company shared that its premium or music subscriber base was 60% more than when YouTube last updated that number in September 2021. In September of this year, it announced new means for artists and other creatives to monetize content through its Creator Music initiative.