New public YouTube Audience stat: What it means for artists
A new public YouTube audience stat provides a new metric for artists and he industry to measure and market popularity.
New public YouTube Audience stat: What it means for artists
“We’re introducing a new fan-facing public metric on YouTube Music: Monthly Audience,” the platform shared in a post on its support site. “It will update daily to show an artist’s total number of unique listeners and viewers across all formats in the last 28 days.”
Monthly Audience in YouTube Music is not yet widely available, but should rollout broadly soon.
How YouTube Audience is calculate
YouTube Monthly Audience includes listening and viewing of an artist’s content across all of YouTube including YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids.
This metric includes users who have viewed or listened to:
- Videos, including Shorts, uploaded by the artist or their label
- Collaborations featuring the artist’s music uploaded to other channels
- Videos, including Shorts, uploaded by fans with the artist’s music
- Non-music content from the artist’s channel
What YouTube Monthy Audience means for artists
YouTube has more than 2.70 billion monthly active users as of January 2025. The only platform with more active users than YouTube is Facebook, with 3.06 billion users. Out of the 5.17 billion social media users worldwide, or 63.7% of the global population, 52% access YouTube.
Because YouTube Monthly Audience stats are public and combine activity across al YouTube channels , it offers a new way to measure audience.
Until now Spotify’s ‘Monthly Listeners’ metric and followers on Bandsintown and social platforms were the only public ways for fans and the industry to measure popularity.
So, YouTube Monthly Audience is good news for artists who have a strong presence on YouTube or YouTube Shorts, but may have lower streaming numbers.
For those that don’t, it means building an audience on YouTube just became more important than ever.
Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, founder of Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.
