Wiz Khalifa — with a little help from Charlie Puth — has just joined the “1 billion views” club on YouTube with his See You Again music video. The song features on the Furious 7 soundtrack and is a tribute to franchise cast member Paul Walker, who died in November 2013.
Google announced the milestone in a post on the YouTube Trends blog. The company says the video took 184 days to amass its billion views, which is faster than any other clip in history — apart from the record-breaking Gangnam Style. There are now 10 videos on YouTube with more than a billion views, all of them music videos, and Google says viewing figures are accelerating all the time.
“For 10 years, the Billion View Club was one of the most exclusive circles on YouTube, but in 2015, things changed,” writes YouTube’s Kevin Allocca. “At the start of this past June, only two videos had reached that echelon. But in just the past six months, EIGHT additional videos crossed the mark.”
YouTube has very kindly put together a playlist of the top 10: It features tracks from Mark Ronson, Meghan Trainor, Enrique Iglesias, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber has well as Psy and Wiz Khalifa. Both Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have two entries in the list — presumably they get to chair meetings when the Billion View Club gets together.
For a long time, Bieber’s Baby was the most-watched video on YouTube, until Gangnam Style came along to smash just about every record in the book (breaking YouTube’s view counter along the way). Apparently OneRepublic’s Counting Stars video is in line to be the next video to get into the club, if you want to help give it a boost.
It just goes to show how important music is to YouTube’s popularity — something the major record labels haven’t failed to notice.
