Gangnam Style has finally lost its crown as YouTube’s most-played song
Nearly three billion views, but no longer number one
We know, we know. You didn’t even realise ‘Gangnam Style’ by Psy was still the most-played song on YouTube. Well, it turns out a lot of people have checked out the video since its release nearly five years ago.
How many? Well the official YouTube video is closing in on THREE BILLION VIEWS – 2,894,744,618 to be exact.
But the 2012 hit has finally been dethroned as the track with the most plays on the streaming service.
Can you guess what our new favourite song is? Favourite being a very generous description.
It’s not Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake it Off’, though the 2014 release is ahead of Psy’s single when it comes to plays per year.
Nor is it ‘Sorry’ by Justin Bieber, which is in third place.
Give up? The honour goes to ‘See You Again’ by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth, better known as ‘That one at the end of Furious 7’.
At the time of writing, the video for ‘See You Again’ has racked up 2,896,088,197 views and more than 900,000 comments.
As the BBC reports: “If one person was to listen to each of those streams consecutively, they'd have to have started during the glacial peak of the last Ice Age.”
The scariest thing is that’s just the numbers for the official video, which only landed on YouTube in April 2015.
Commissioned and recorded as a tribute to the late Paul Walker, it topped the charts in more than 20 countries, including the United States, United Kingdom and Luxembourg. That’s right, all the big ones.
The top 10, according to the BBC, is as follows:
- Wiz Khalifa – ‘See You Again’ (ft. Charlie Puth)
- Psy – ‘Gangnam Style’
- Justin Bieber – ‘Sorry’
- Mark Ronson – ‘Uptown Funk’ (ft. Bruno Mars)
- Luis Fonsi – ‘Despacito’ (ft. Daddy Yankee)
- Taylor Swift – ‘Shake it Off’
- Enrique Iglesias – ‘Bailando’
- Maroon 5 – ‘Sugar’
- Katy Perry – ‘Roar’
- Taylor Swift – ‘Blank Space’
Of course, some of the above were released much more recently than ‘Gangnam Style’ (‘Despacito has racked up more than 2.4bn views just this year) so we can expect the top 10 to continue changing on a fairly regular basis.
