YouTube Music Goes Platinum With 5 Billion Play Store Downloads

Almost seven years after its first release, the YouTube Music app has hit the 5 billion download milestone on the Google Play Store.

While this was a foregone conclusion, there is a murky history with YouTube Music. Since the big switch over from Google Play Music to YouTube Music in late 2019, there have been lots of vocal detractors who simply haven’t taken to the new app.

Around this time, YouTube Music became the default streaming platform on almost all Android phones and has been bundled with the Google apps that you’ll find on most brand-new devices since Android 10. That has undoubtedly bolstered the volume of downloads that YouTube Music has gained since the switchover.

For reference, Spotify is the world’s biggest streaming platform and only has 1 billion downloads on the Play Store. It’s clear that not all of those people are subscribers or even users of the app. As of February 2024, there were a reported 100 million subscribers to YouTube Premium. You are able to use the service without a premium plan, but certain functions like offline downloads are not available.

Google’s push to make YouTube Music the home for podcasts could also account for a large portion of recent year downloads. However, it is a music-first application that has steadily filled the Play Music void as features have been slowly added and iterated on.

Ad-free YouTube Music is included for free in specific YouTube Premium packages worldwide. The 5 billion app download figure is clearly bolstered by those who probably never even opened the application and those upgrading their Android devices since it launched.

That technicality aside, YouTube Music joins an elite club of Android apps that have surpassed the 5 billion download milestone and this comes just a few weeks after Files by Google hit the same figure. This is the 21st app to achieve the feat, and although it is bolstered by the virtue of being pre-installed on almost all new Android phones, you know that you can use it practically anywhere.