Key Points
- YouTube Premium rises to $16/month for individuals and $27/month for families, with Premium Lite increasing to $9/month.
- The price increases follow feature expansions to the lower-cost Premium Lite tier, which now includes offline downloads and background playback.
- YouTube Music Premium is rising to $12/month, positioning it competitively against Spotify, though some other music services are cheaper.
Google-owned streaming platform YouTube has notified customers of its two Premium plans that the amount they pay to watch content without advertising interruptions is about to go up.
The cost of YouTube Premium rises to $16 per month for individual accounts and $27 per month for family accounts, according to notices sent to subscribers. A lower-priced plan called YouTube Premium Lite is also increasing to $9 per month.
The price adjustment on the YouTube Premium Lite tier comes a few weeks after the company updated that plan to include offline downloads and background video and audio playing, features that were previously reserved for the more-expensive Premium tier. Enhanced bitrate streaming and commercial-free music video playback are still reserved for the higher-end tier, and YouTube Premium Lite doesn’t include access to YouTube Music Premium.
A standalone subscription to YouTube Premium Music is also going up in price, with YouTube charging $12 per month for access to that plan. The price is about $1 less than what Spotify charges for its premium tier, but $1 more than what Apple Music costs. Unlike Spotify and Apple Music, YouTube Music Premium does not offer lossless, high-quality music streams.
The price adjustments are scheduled to roll out to existing subscribers when their plans renew in June, according to customer notices reviewed by The Desk. YouTube said the price adjustment allows the service to continue delivering improvements, and to support content creators and music artists that subscribers enjoy.
The price adjustment comes just a few days after some non-YouTube Premium subscribers reported encountering 90-second unskippable advertising on the TV version of the service. A spokesperson for YouTube clarified that the company isn’t testing 90-second unskippable ads, and that a clock in the corner of some TV screens displayed an erroneous countdown. The service does have 30-second ads that can’t be skipped when playing some content back on TVs, though most of its ads on the desktop and mobile versions of YouTube are skippable after a few seconds.
While prices are increasing on YouTube’s premium tiers, the cost of YouTube’s streaming pay TV service has fallen thanks to the introduction of new genre-based programming packages. The cost of YouTube TV’s Entertainment Plan — which includes channels owned by Disney, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast’s NBC Universal, Versant and a few other companies — costs $55 per month, but doesn’t include sports or news channels. Separate packages for sports and news networks are also available, and the packages can be bundled together at varying price points. YouTube TV doesn’t include access to YouTube Premium or YouTube Music Premium.
