Irving Azoff, legendary music mogul as well as the chairman and CEO of The Azoff Company, took aim at YouTube on Tuesday at TheWrap’s TheGrill 2025 conference, where the industry icon called the Google-owned company a “bully” and doubled down on his previous assessment that they’re not paying artists “their fair share.”
“I’m fiercely protective of artists rights, and YouTube is by far the worst offender,” Azoff told moderator and TheWrap founder and editor in chief Sharon Waxman on Tuesday morning at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles. “I’m really not fond when companies take advantage of creators. But YouTube has, in my opinion, invented new words for the way to bully people.”
Azoff’s frustrations with the company come down to how YouTube treats musical artists. Specifically, the executive accused the company of underpaying artists compared to its closest competitors and of threatening to remove artist channels when it receives pushback during negotiations.
“When you get down to the end on a negotiation with them, they call your artists, they call the record company, they go take your music down. Obviously, their market power is unchecked at this point,” Azoff said.
He added that YouTube’s rates on music were 20% “of what their top competitor pays,” declining to elaborate on who that competitor is.
YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
This isn’t the first time Azoff has criticized YouTube. It isn’t even the first time the executive has done so at TheWrap’s annual Grill event. Nine years ago, Azoff appeared onstage and called YouTube “evil.” “We’re at a time, especially in music, when there’s such a lack of respect for intellectual property, and they’re the worst defender of it,” Azoff said at the time.
But Azoff’s complaints go beyond the music industry. Without naming names, Azoff also pointed to several in the television industry — including a late night host — who are frustrated with YouTube for not paying artists fairly and for contributing to declining linear TV ratings.
“It’s incredible that YouTube doesn’t pay their fair share, so therefore the parent company is losing money on your show,” Azoff said, specifically referring to the economics of late night. “If they paid their fair share, the economics on these shows would look really different.”
Azoff pointed to the massive viewership that late night shows from hosts like Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon get on YouTube. As TheWrap has previously covered, the ad revenue made from when shows post clips or entire episodes on YouTube are peanuts compared to the advertising dollars made from cable and broadcast. So while a series like “The Tonight Show” may have tens of millions of YouTube followers and its videos have high view counts, the amount of money it’s making is significantly less than if its total viewership was on traditional television.
YouTube and the music industry
During the first panel of TheGrill on Tuesday, Azoff noted that in 2024 YouTube alone made $50 billion in revenue. The estimated revenue for their nearest competitor during that same time period was $10 billion. Yet during that time in question, Azoff said that competitor paid its music creators five times as much as YouTube paid theirs.
It’s likely that Azoff is referring to the numbers Alphabet reported during its third quarter earnings for 2024. Though Alphabet typically doesn’t break out YouTube subscription revenue in its earnings, during that earning call, the company reported that YouTube’s total ad revenue, including subscriptions, surpassed $50 billion over the past four quarters for the first time. Though Alphabet typically doesn’t report the subscription revenue from YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, YouTube Music Premium or NFL Sunday Ticket, that $50 billion figure does include those subscription-based services.
“We continue to have significant growth in our subscription products, driven primarily by YouTube TV and YouTube Music Premium, as well as Google One, primarily due to increases in the number of paid subscribers,” Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet and Google senior vice president and chief financial officer, said on the call.
Azoff’s claim is a splashy one. But the more you poke into it, the more difficult it becomes to validate, largely because of how these companies report their finances and creator payouts.
What makes YouTube’s $50 billion figure difficult to compare to similar companies is that it doesn’t just reflect the revenue YouTube made from music. It represents the company’s other subscriptions, videos from media companies and the billions of creator-made videos that power the company.
But for the sake of argument, let’s take YouTube’s $50 billion in revenue figure at face value. Throughout 2024, total revenue at Spotify — one of the company’s top rivals — totaled €4.2 billion, or about $4.9 billion. [Note: Because Apple does not break out the revenue for Apple Music, it won’t be included in this article.] In 2024, Spotify also reported that it paid $10 billion to the music industry.
When you try to figure out how much YouTube has paid to music creators, you quickly run into another headache. During the company’s 2025 Made on YouTube presentation, it revealed that YouTube has paid over $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies globally over the last four years. YouTube does not break out this metric by either year or segment.
This lack of transparency coupled with YouTube’s vast content ecosystem makes it difficult to track how YouTube has paid musical artists based on publicly available data. But the music industry isn’t the only one that’s felt the impact of the tech giant.
YouTube and decreased linear TV rating
Azoff’s feud with YouTube hasn’t only existed in the court of public opinion. In 2014, the executive issued a legal warning to the company after YouTube failed to immediately remove 20,000 songs that were produced by his company, Global Music Rights.
YouTube has had disputes with a number of major media companies, including a contract dispute over carriage rights between Paramount and YouTube TV in February as well as one between Fox and YouTube TV in August. YouTube TV is also in the middle of a carriage rights dispute with both TelevisaUnivision and NBC Universal.
As part of this dispute, NBCUniversal said in a statement “Google, with its $3 trillion market cap, already controls what Americans see online through search and ads – now it wants to control what we watch.”
Despite his skepticism and frustrations with the company, Azoff was overall optimistic that the landscape will eventually shift to be more favorable to artists.
“I’m more hopeful that something gets done, because it’s not just the music industry that they’re bullying … It’s everybody. I can’t believe that everybody versus them isn’t going to make a difference,” he said.
