A viral music video that’s now been viewed by just under the equivalent of a third of the world’s population has just cracked an historic digital milestone.
‘Gangnam Style’, the breakout single from K-Pop star Psy, has become the first video on YouTube to crack over 2 billion views, just under two years after the horse-themed dance hit first went viral.
Whether you love it or hate it (there’s currently 1,041,18 ‘dislikes’ on YouTube), there’s do denying the song’s enduring popularity since it was first uploaded in July, 2012 and in that time, viewers have watched 504 billion seconds worth of ‘Gangnam Style’- approximately 15,971.1 years, as Rolling Stone estimates.
The man behind PSY, 36-year-old Park Jaesang, issued his thanks to fans for the music video milestone on Twitter (in some charmingly broken English).
very honorable and burdensome numbers. With the appreciation,I’ll come back soon with more joyful one! #THX pic.twitter.com/Jay0pqeEZy
— PSY (@psy_oppa) May 31, 2014
‘Gangnam Style’ was also the first to crack 1 billion views on YouTube, when four months after its debut in November 2012, it became the most watched video in the world, surpassing former titleholder Justin Bieber, for his 2010 single ‘Baby’.
The South Korean singer’s signature video has now nearly doubled Bieber’s top viewed tally and ‘Gangnam Style’ trounces YouTube’s third most watched video, ‘On The Floor’ by Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez, which sits at 717 million views, and fourth place non-music viral video ‘Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!”
Psy also holds a YouTube record for his ‘Gangnam Style’ follow-up single, ‘Gentleman’, which racked up the most views in a single day when it attracted 28 million views in the first 24 hours of being uploaded and is currently the 7th on the list of the all-time most viewed clips on the website with over 687 million views.
The success of ‘Gangnam Style’ also brought Psy to Australia, as part of the Future Music Festival 2013 lineup, where our Sydney reviewer remarked he did what “he does best (and can probably only do); a short set of songs that seem to include two versions of ‘Gangnam Style’, and two others that sound just like it. It’s fun though and PSY’s genial banter and cartoon styling lighten any tensions.”
