Biography & Early Wealth Journey

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Now, we all know that $9 billion is a huge amount of money no matter which way you cut it. But the point really hits home when you compare YouTube's annual revenue with the revenue that other leading music streaming services have recently generated. Deezer generated just $155 million in revenue in 2014. Pandora generated $1.1 billion in 2014 and 2015. Finally, Spotify earned $1.3 billion in revenue in 2014. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that YouTube made more than triple the revenue of all three of the aforementioned streaming services combined, all four of the companies have one thing in common: none of them turn a profit.

How YouTube manages to generate all of that revenue is easy to see when you break down the number of users that YouTube has, versus the number of users that subscription streaming services have overall. There are 41 million streaming music users, as of a 2014 estimate, the total amount of worldwide users of YouTube rests at a cool 1 billion users. This means that for every 100 people, only four of them use a streaming service, while 96 use YouTube. In addition, while the subscription services can only earn revenue through music plays, YouTube also has a plethora of non-music related videos that help boost its earnings into hyperdrive. So it's easy to see how YouTube is able to earn exponentially more revenue than the subscription services.

Primary Income Streams & Multi-Million Contracts

There is one area, though, where the subscription services beat out YouTube: revenues paid to label. Subscription services account for 71 percent of all revenues paid to music labels, while YouTube accounts for just 29 percent.