In December of 2012 Psy’s Gangnam Style became the first video to ever break the billion view mark on YouTube. Since then the billion view mark has been a fairly exclusive club made up of pop hits and kids songs. In fact the most viewed video currently with over 9 billion views is Baby Shark Dance.
And of the other top 30 highest viewed videos 7 of them are kids songs, and none of them are rock songs. But there are rock songs with over a billion views, and some have broken records too. According to Wikipedia:
- “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses became the first video made prior to YouTube’s creation to reach this threshold by July 2018.[5]
- “Numb” by Linkin Park was the first 2000s video predating YouTube to reach 1 billion views in November 2018.[6]
- “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen was the first 1970s video (and pre-1990s video) to reach 1 billion views in July 2019.[7]
- “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses was the first 1980s video to reach 1 billion views in October 2019.[8]
So rock songs are definitely popular, and they obviously last much longer. But I think we should all pull together to make more rock videos hit this mark, and keep pushing the our favorite style of music up. Like maybe every month we all vote on a song and go play it on repeat for an hour or something to really spike that videos views until it reaches a billion.
That also seems like a lot of work, so maybe not. Anyway here’s Thunderstruck, now with over 1 billion, 4 million views, and then some.