YouTube head of music Lyor Cohen announces that the visual platform paid an estimated four billion dollars in revenues to the music industry in the last 12 months. This report was made on the visual platforms official blog last week.

The Global Music Head explains why this is an important feat in his post; 

“… Our goal is to become the leading revenue generator for the music industry and to help artists around the world build a career making music.”

On our local scene, many artistes have gained from these payouts based on the fact that their streaming numbers have skyrocketed since the pandemic. 

In a recent article by Donovan Watkis of World Music Views, he noted that Shenseea, alone, received approximately 150 million streams in the last year. Big names like Damian Marley, Popcaan and Alkaline received over 200 million streams in that time frame. The ‘Gaza Boss’ Vybz Kartel and international superstar Shaggy each doubled those numbers with an estimated 400 million streams each. 

The real winner in stream numbers however would be grammy winner Sean Paul who has an estimated 1 billion streams.