[NJRBailey]

How come you think YouTube Premium would be the same cost as Spotify or Netflix? Spotify in particular only has to store and stream audio, and Netflix has far far less video and audio to store than YouTube - they also both only allow somewhat official content on their platforms (you have to register as an artist to upload to Spotify, and you have to be a registered studio to get onto Netflix). YouTube allows unlimited length, 8K, HDR, 60fps video from anyone who signs up with an email and password. I don't have any actual numbers, but I find it difficult to imagine that YouTube Music (storing one cover image and some audio tracks for a whole album) costs them anything in comparison to the main YouTube service.

[Closi]

Well, I guess I'm really talking about the price of the service rather than the cost to run it really (i.e. what would be a competitive price for the service considering other offerings), but appreciate that the price has to be less than their costs.

Although my assumption (which could be incorrect) is that storage is not the main driver for cost. For Netflix and Spotify I assume their major cost would be licencing, which YouTube mostly gets to forgo. For YouTube, I would assume bandwidth / data transfer is the biggest factor.