Adele Fastest To 1 Billion YouTube Views

While everyone has marveled at Adele's physical sales power, her online video views are nothing to sneeze at either. Her "Hello" video has now been crowned the fastest to 1 billion views (that's with a "b") ever, reaching the landmark in just 88 days.

Psy's "Gangham Style" was the previous leader at 159 days, followed by Wiz Kahlifa's "See You Again" at 186 days, and Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" at 238 days.

"Hello" has been an online video powerhouse ever since it was released, hitting a record-breaking 27.7 million views within the first 24 hours, then hitting 100 million just 5 days later. The video has added around 10 million views a day almost every day of November and December.

Only 14 artists have songs that have reached the billion view mark, and most have taken anywhere from 6 months to 5 years to do so. Taylor Swift is the only artist to have 2 songs at the billion view level, with the other song being "Shake It Off."

This just goes to prove that a million views (or a million of anything) just isn't that much in our new Music 4.0 world. A song only becomes a hit when it reaches 50 million (and a minor hit at that), and a real hit at a 100 million. It's only the superstars that hit that coveted 1 billion mark.

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"Gangnam Style" Breaks The YouTube Counter

You'd think that after all this time, Psy's viral hit "Gangnam Style" would be history, yet it lives and and still receives massive views. So many, in fact, that it broke YouTube's view counter.

"Gangnam Style" hit 2,147,483,647 views (yes, more than 2.1 billion), which was the maximum limit of the 32 bit integer that the view register was based on. "We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32 bit integer, but that was before we met Psy," the company stated.

YouTube has since updated its view calculator so its based on a 64 bit integer, which means that the max views is more than 9.22 billion before it hits it busts again.

This seems like an impossible number to hit, but then again, now one knew Psy before this song, so you just never know when the next viral star might break the counter again. "Gangnam Style" now sits at a bit more than 2.91 billion views with the new counter in place!

YouTube's Latest Impressive Stats

If you're an artist, much of your life revolves around YouTube these days. It's not only the #1 way that consumers discover new music online, but it's also the place where most people consume their music as well. Recently the service posted some very impressive new numbers.

Viewership

• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that's almost an hour for every person on Earth

MORE:

• 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 80% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 61 countries and across 61 languages
• According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network
• Millions of subscriptions happen each day. The number of people subscribing daily is up more than 3x since last year, and the number of daily subscriptions is up more than 4x since last year

Mobile and Devices

• Mobile makes up almost 40% of YouTube's global watch time
• YouTube is available on hundreds of millions of devices

Content ID

• Content ID scans over 400 years of video every day
• More than 5,000 partners use Content ID, including major US network broadcasters, movie studios and record labels
• We have more than 25 million reference files in our Content ID database; it's among the most comprehensive in the world
• Content ID has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for partners

Now with the introduction of Music Key, it looks like these numbers can only grow. It will be interesting to see what they look like next year at this time.

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2014 First Year Ever Without A Platinum Album

With all the albums that have come out this year it's pretty amazing that exactly zero have been certified platinum by the RIAA. Yes, you read that right - there have been no million selling albums this year yet!

What's worse, it doesn't look like there will be any by the end of the year either. The two closest are Beyonce's self-titled album and Lorde's Pure Heroine, but both aren't even reached the 800,000 mark yet and their sales have slowed in recent months.

Actually, there has been one million seller - the soundtrack to Frozen has sold over 3 million, but that's a soundtrack and not a popular artist.

Back when the business was at its peak, there might have been 20 to 30 million sellers by this time just about every year (both recent releases and catalog), but those days are long gone.

On the other hand, there have been 60 platinum songs so far this year, but even that's down about 20% from last year, as the music consumer moves to streaming instead of purchase.

Yes, we're definitely in a singles era where the song is vastly more important than the album, but we're also in a very important YouTube era where a song can get 100 million views yet sell less than 10,000 copies. And today, that's considered a bit hit.

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