For the first time in three years, YouTube is raising subscription prices for its YouTube Premium plans, the streaming giant said Friday.
The basic YouTube Premium plan will rise by $2 per month to $15.99, with the Music and Premium Lite plans rising by $1 per month to $11.99 and $8.99, respectively. The family plan goes up by $4 per month to $26.99, but allows up to six people in the same household access.
YouTube Premium offers its subscribers a number of features, but the core ones are ad-free videos, background playback (so users can listen to a video podcast or music video, for example), and offline downloads. It also gives access to other features.
Premium Lite, which launched a year ago, has some of the same features, although not all videos are ad-free. YouTube Music is the company’s music subscription service, which competes with Spotify and Apple Music.
“We’re updating the price of YouTube Premium plans in the US for the first time since 2023 to continue delivering a high-quality experience that supports creators and artists on YouTube,” a YouTube spokesperson said. Hollywood Reporter. “This change allows us to maintain the features our members value most: ad-free viewing, background play, and the massive library of over 300 million tracks on YouTube Music. We continue to offer multiple plans, ensuring subscribers can choose the option that works best for them.”
YouTube is the dominant video streaming platform (and by some measures the largest media company in the world), but its subscription business remains somewhat underappreciated given the size of its free service.
A year ago, the company said it had surpassed more than 125 million YouTube Premium and YouTube Music subscribers.
YouTube isn’t the only streaming platform to raise subscription prices in recent months. In March, Netflix raised the monthly prices for all of its plans by $1 to $2 per month, while Amazon Prime Video raised the cost of removing ads by $2 per month. Spotify raised the cost of its Basic plan to $12.99 in January.
