The Music Videos That Get Love on Valentine’s Day

Around Valentine’s Day, we’ve noticed that some music videos consistently become popular, every year. For example, here are the YouTube views of “I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder in February 2015:

Total Views* of “I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder

*“Views” is based on both official and fan-uploaded videos claimed using Content ID

As Valentine’s Day approaches, YouTube users endearingly share, message and email “I Just Called to Say I Love You” at a much higher rate.

But that’s just Stevie Wonder. Here’s the music that people play the most around Valentine’s Day: 

Songs That Consistently Become Popular on Valentine’s Day

Views of video increased by at least 50 percent on Valentine’s Day, every year, since 2012.¹

Artist	Song	Release Date
Laura Pausini	Le Cose Che Vivi	1996
Nat King Cole	L-O-V-E	1964
Axel	Amo	2005
Franco de Vita	Te Amo	1988
Joaquín Sabina or Sabina y Cía	Contigo	1996
Adam Sandler	Grow Old With You	1998
Stevie Wonder	I Just Called to Say I Love You	1984
Savage Garden	Truly Madly Deeply	1997
Barry White	Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe	1974
Barry White	You're the First, the Last, My Everything	1974
Umberto Tozzi	Ti Amo	1977
Elton John	Can You Feel the Love Tonight	1994
Jovanotti	A Te	2008
Axel	Tu Amor Por Siempre	2005
Rabito	... Que Te Quiero	2003
Tercer Cielo	Enamorados	2012
Chayanne	Completamente Enamorados	1990
Bryan Adams	Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?	1995

¹Methodology
Songs that have at least a 50 percent increase in views on Valentine’s Day vs. average across January, March, April, and May (using the same weekday in the month), 2012 to 2015. To control for well-known songs (and eliminate obscure ones), we’ve omitted any videos that, on average, do not have at least 20,000 views/day outside of Valentine’s Day.



To create this list, we searched for songs with views that increase at least 50 percent on Valentine’s Day, every year, since 2012. Of all music on YouTube, only 18 songs fit this criteria.

Some observations:

• Barry White and Axel both have two tracks each.
• Nat King Cole’s “L-O-V-E” (1964) and Barry White’s “Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” (1974) are the oldest tracks on this list.
• Spanish, not French, may be the language of love: Seven of the 18 songs are in Spanish, eight are in English, three in Italian, and none are French.
• The only woman is Laura Pausini (an Italian artist).

Sadly, some of our favorite love songs just missed the cut of a 50 percent increase for four consecutive years, including: “Nobody” by Keith Sweat, “My Love Is Your Love” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston, and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles.

-- Posted by the YouTube Culture & Trends Team

'Hello' Joins List of Fastest Videos to Reach 100M Views

In less than a week, Adele's debut of her new single reached a milestone it takes most major music videos months to achieve. "Hello" crossed 100 million views in just five days, making it the fastest video to reach it in 2015. It's the second-fastest video ever to hit that mark, trailing only "Gentleman," PSY's 2013 follow up to the global smash hit "Gangnam Style," which did it in four.

Four of the five quickest videos to cross that threshold are from female artists. Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball," Shakira and Rihanna's "Can't Remember to Forget You," and Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" all saw explosive viewership for their much-discussed releases.

The 100 million-view mark was famously first crossed by another female singer, Avril Lavigne, whose original video for "Girlfriend" crossed in 2008.

Adele's earlier singles took longer to hit 100 million, and the explosive speed at which her latest release took off speaks to the scale of the audience of fans she's developed since.

The numbers here also speak to the global fanbase Adele has acquired. Over the weekend, "Hello" was the most-viewed video in 92 different countries ranging from Brazil, Greece, South Africa, France, Canada, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.

- Kevin Allocca

Adele's New Single Played Over 1M Times…PER HOUR

Late last week, two of music's biggest stars dropped new singles, both of which saw explosive viewership numbers within hours of their release.

Over three years after her most-recent upload, Adele released the video for her new single "Hello" in the early hours of Friday morning (approximately 12amPT). Within 48 hours, it had been viewed 50 million times, making it the biggest debut of any video on YouTube in 2015 and one of the most-watched music video debuts of all time.

In fact, "adele hello" was, by far, YouTube's top search on Friday and Saturday, and the video garnered as much as 1.6 million views in a single hour, averaging over 1 million views per hour over the first two days.

(For comparison, the release of the massively anticipated full trailer for "Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens" peaked at 1.2 million views per hour.)

Meanwhile, Justin Bieber scored another massive debut -- third-largest music video debut of 2015 -- and did so... without being in the video. The release -- designated as a "dance video" -- for the song "Sorry" was seen approximately 20 million times in its first 48 hours.

Both releases also helped grow these artists' respective YouTube audiences considerably as well, with Adele gaining over 400,000 subscribers over the weekend and Bieber picking up over 150,000 in the three days following his new vid.

If you're one of the handful of people who have missed these two premieres, you can see them both below.

-- Kevin Allocca

Billion-view videos are happening faster on YouTube

Wiz Khalifa and his video "See You Again" hit a milestone this week, becoming the tenth video ever to cross 1 billion views on YouTube. At 184 days, "See You Again" is the second-fastest video to hit 1 billion in YouTube history (after “Gangnam Style”), and the quickest of the past year. Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s tribute to the late Paul Walker joins what appears to be an ever-accelerating trend in billion-view videos.

For ten years, the Billion View Club was one of the most exclusive circles on YouTube, but in 2015, things changed. 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. Here are the videos ranked by views with a graph showing the trajectory of these videos over the past five years.

As you can see below, the rate at which videos are accelerating to this milestone appears to be increasing as well. The average number of days it took for a video to cross 1 billion is 484 days, but of the videos that have done it, the three most recent crossed it at an average of 241 days.

Other fun facts:

• In what may be a surprise to Americans, Enrique Iglesias' "Bailando" became the second non-English video to cross 1 billion views. According to YouTube Music Insights, one-third of Iglesias' views come from Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina alone.
• Only one of the videos is for a debut single, Meghan Trainor's 2014 hit "All About That Bass."
• The first to reach the milestone was PSY with his K-pop smash hit "Gangnam Style" on December 21, 2012, at a record pace of 160 days from its upload, a record that still stands today.
• Next was Justin Bieber with what had been, for years, YouTube's most viewed video, "Baby," on March 2, 2014.
• Katy Perry and Taylor Swift each have had two videos hit this mark, "Roar"/"Dark Horse" and "Blank Space"/"Shake It Off" respectively.
• Next closest to a billion: One Republic's "Counting Stars."

Count down all the music videos with 1 billion views in this playlist!

-- Kevin Allocca

G Is for Gangnam Style: #10YearsofYouTube

In the world of YouTube, there are hit videos and then there is Gangnam Style. Standing at a jaw-dropping 2.3 billion views, to refer to the perennial favorite as “viral” would be a gross understatement -- this video was a global pandemic unlike anything the world had seen before.

Just how big is Gangnam Style? With 11,000+ years of watchtime, the total amount of Gangnam Style served up by YouTube thus far would be enough to fill nearly 50 million standard VHS tapes (remember those?).

At its peak, the track was searched for more than 5 million times in a single day and raked in as many as 14.9 million daily views. And that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands of covers, parodies, flash mobs, dance routines and tributes to the now ubiquitous clip. From Ellen to President Obama to the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon and beyond, nobody has been immune to the reach of Psy and his mesmerizing dance moves. The list of achievements goes on and on and on.

But the influence of Gangnam Style cannot just be measured in the video’s total views, watch time and sheer numbers of fans. Perhaps even more remarkably, the K-pop crossover hit helped introduce a whole new infectious sound to the rest of the world. Prior to Gangnam Style, a typical K-pop track would receive the lion’s share of its views from Asia. Take Big Bang’s early 2012 clip for “Fantastic Baby,” which received more than 50% of its first month’s views from Asia, with 15% coming from South Korea directly. Just a year after Gangnam, however, global views of K-pop videos jumped to ~30 million views a day, with more than 95% of their views coming from outside their country of origin. The effect helped formerly regional South Korean favorites like 2NE1 and the aforementioned Big Bang crossover into YouTube’s mainstream, earning a combined 1.5B views and 7,600+ years of watch time since Gangnam Style was first unleashed on the world.

While Psy still currently resides in a class of his own, all signs point to the 1+ Billion Views Club not being so lonely for Psy in the months and years to come. Already joined by Justin Bieber -- “Baby” crossed the historic threshold two months after Psy -- tracks from the likes of Katy Perry, Shakira, Taylor Swift, Meghan Trainor and Miley Cyrus have the big 1,000,000,000 mark well within their reach. Not to be outdone, Psy himself is looking to again join in on the fun, with his 2013 chart-topper just 175 million shy of the billion-view milestone. Your move, Biebs.

Curious who else ranks up there with Psy? Here are the top 10 most-viewed music videos on YouTube.

-- Kevin Meenan

10 Surprising Things That Happened in Music on YouTube This Year

Earlier this week, we shared our annual list of the top 25 music videos that made us wiggle in 2014. In sifting through the data, we also uncovered some surprising facts about the artists and songs that made a splash this year. Here are ten of our favorites, coming at you like a dark horse:

1. These numbers don’t lie: 2014 was the Year of Shakira. With two songs in the Top 10 and more than 1.8 billion views to her channel this year, she was bigger than Nicki Minaj and Jason Derulo combined. Her channel also saw the biggest growth in views of any artist, year over year.
   
   
2. Another Latin icon, Enriqué Iglesias, is also keeping the magic alive. With 1.5 billion views, he had more eyes on his channel this year than One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer combined (!).
   
   
3. With nearly three-quarters of a billion views, Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” wasn’t just the biggest music video on YouTube in 2014, it’s the biggest video on YouTube this year – period.
   
   
4. While Katy Perry holds the crown for top video of the year, Meghan Trainor wins the prize for biggest breakout star. Since her channel launch in February, Trainor went from near obscurity to worldwide fame (and 400 million views) with “All About That Bass” - one of 2014’s top 10 music videos worldwide.
   
   
5. India’s T-Series (a record label) is one of the 20 most popular channels in the world this year, with over 5B total views, thanks to favorites like “Baby Doll” and “Chaar Botal Vodka Full” from this year’s Bollywood hit, "Ragini MMS 2."
   
   
6. Some might have called 2013 “the year of Yoncé,” but on YouTube, 2014 has been Queen Bey’s biggest by far, with her channel racking up well over 1B views this year alone.
   
   
7. EDM music accounted for 50 percent of the top 10 live performances of the year, with Tomorrowland’s first weekend live stream receiving the most commentary - more than 1M comments over the course of the show - of any YouTube video this year.
   
   
8. Since its debut in March, DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” has inspired more than 20,000 tributes, parodies, and other demonstrations of getting #turnt.
   
   
9. Though posted at the end of 2013, Pharrell’s “Happy” kept the party going well into this year, becoming the most liked (2.4M thumbs up and counting) music video of 2014.
   
   
10. And how could we let this list go without a hat tip to "Frozen"? “Let it Go,” the Disney movie’s top musical number, was one of the most viewed and covered songs of the year, netting more than 1 billion views across its top 5 official YouTube videos.

-- Christine Huang, Bonnie Gleicher, and Claire Stapleton

Gangnam Style is the first video to reach 2 billion YouTube views

Fire up the foam machine and slip into your best powder-blue tux. “Gangnam Style,” the most viewed video of all time on YouTube, crossed 2 billion views, making it the first video to reach this milestone.



Even in a world of “Wrecking Ball”-s, “Let it Go”-s, and “Charlie Bit My Finger”-s, there are viral videos—and then there’s “Gangnam Style.” It’s had a blistering, record-smashing run since it was uploaded in July 2012: zipping past Justin Bieber’s “Baby” just three months later to become the most-watched video of all time (then “just” 800M views), then crossing a billion views a month after that. In the meantime, it spawned hundreds of thousands of parodies and fan tributes from around the world. Even as we near its two-year anniversary, the viewcount has continued to climb: “Gangnam” has racked up almost 100 million views so far in 2014.

And while Psy may be a K-Pop artist singing about a neighborhood most people outside of Korea had never heard of, the “Gangnam” phenomenon is decidedly global: 97 percent of its lifetime views are from outside Korea, with rabid fanships sprouting up in surprising places.

Perhaps most interestingly, the success of “Gangnam Style” signaled a surge in K-Pop popularity on YouTube. Viewership of K-Pop videos has exploded over the last few years: going from around 700 million total views on YouTube in 2010 to more than 5.5 billion in 2013.



Psy’s follow-up to “Gangnam,” another K-Pop banger called “Gentleman,” set the record for the most views ever in a single day (38 million on April 14, 2013). 대~박! (That’s Korean for “holy cow!”)

So what will be the next entry into the billion views club? So far, it’s lonely at the top—Psy is joined only by Bieber, whose “Baby” was inducted in February. Only time will tell which bit of viral brilliance will take the world by storm next. ’Til then, we have just one thing to say… Oppa Gangnam Style!

-- Claire Stapleton

How Much Do We Love 'Love' Songs?

You may have heard that "Love" is one of the most common words in song titles, and it's true that many of Billboard's top charting songs include the word. But what about in the world of web video?

On YouTube, there are well approximately 5 million music videos with the word "love" in the title and those videos have been watched over a whopping 50 BILLION times. The most popular of them is Eminem and Rihanna's "Love the Way You Lie", which has over 600 million views to date.

Below you'll find a chart of when these "love" music videos were posted over the history of the site. With the exception of one anomaly in 2008, the majority of peaks are right around Valentine's Day when we see an uptick in "love"-related uploads.



Here are the top 10 "love" music videos on YouTube of all-time:

1. Love the Way You Lie - Eminem ft. Rihanna
2. International Love - Pitbull ft. Chris Brown
3. We Found Love - Rihanna ft. Calvin Harris
4. Somebody to Love Remix - Justin Bieber ft. Usher
5. Love You Like a Love Song - Selena Gomez and The Scene
6. Stereo Love - Edward Maya and Vika Jigulina
7. As Long As You Love Me - Justin Bieber ft. Big Sean
8. This is Love - will.i.am and Eva Simons
9. Love Story - Taylor Swift
10. Love Me - Justin Bieber

Watch them all below:



Or, instead of watching those, here's a cover video that mashes up over 25 different love songs in one.

-- Kevin Allocca

Data Behind the 2013 YouTube Music Awards Nominees

The first-ever YouTube Music Awards are live this Sunday evening at 6pmET and to celebrate, we did a little digging into the data behind some of the 2013 nominees, all of which were selected based on a series of viewership, subscriber, and/or engagement metrics. (To get all the details on the nominees read this or check out the YouTube Spotlight channel where you can also vote for the winners.)

Video of the year is one of the categories drawing the most interest, and that's not really a surprise when you consider the 1.9 billion views these videos currently have combined. That's an average of over half a million views for every second of video.

Here is daily viewership data (though, please note that we have cut off the initial "Gentleman" spike, which at a record 38 million views in a single day made this chart hilariously unreadable):



The ten nominees for Artist of the Year drew nearly 10 billion views combined on their official videos between October 2012 and the start of this month. They also saw large numbers of new subscribers to those channels. And while many of the artists reside in the United States, when you look at likes, shares, and other types of fan activity, over 75% of the combined engagement top artists saw was from outside the U.S.

Here you can see their weekly growth in subscribers and the impact new video releases from Rihanna and PSY had on their channels:



While the data determined the nominees, the winners will be decided by fans whose sharing activity this week and last will be tallied right up to Sunday night's show.

For the expert trend trackers, see if you can guess what keyword this graph of YouTube search data represents... (hint: it's the top spiking "music"-related search of 2013)



Click to find the answer.

-- Kevin Allocca

A year since Gangnam Style, K-Pop keeps getting bigger

On July 15, PSY's now legendary video for "Gangnam Style" will officially turn 1 year old. The video is already the most viewed video ever on YouTube and was the first clip ever to surpass 1 billion views -- it currently stands at 1.7B and is still growing for those counting. But impact of the biggest web video phenomenon of 2012 extends beyond PSY's singular music video.



While global interest in K-Pop has been on the rise for the past few years, the data suggests views of Korean artists tripled in the year following the release of Gangnam Style. Here's a chart of monthly views on top K-Pop channels, including PSY:


In the year before "Gangnam Style", official music videos from K-Pop artists were viewed over 2.2 billion times globally. The year following, that number jumped to over 7 billion views, 3x the viewership. In 2011, less than half the viewership on top K-Pop channels was from outside the Asia-Pacific region. Now, the majority of the watching is taking place outside the region. 91% of viewing in the past year was outside Korea.


In the U.S. where, for many, K-Pop had been an unknown genre of music, video viewership of top K-Pop artists doubled the year after "Gangnam Style" hit the web.

So what were people watching?

The top 10 music videos from Korea uploaded since "Gangnam Style" represent a diverse mix. PSY tops the list with his follow-up "Gentleman", which itself now has nearly half of a billion views. Other major acts include Girls Generation and Big Bang, both of which have cultivated large international followings.

You can see the full top 10 via this playlist or watch below:



-- Kevin Allocca

PSY's 'Gentleman' Raises the Bar

Everyone knew the followup to PSY's massive (if unlikely) international hit "Gangnam Style" would draw lots of attention. But considering the assumption-defying nature of PSY's breakout popularity and massive anticipation, it was hard to predict just how big that spike in interest would be. One week and around 200 million views later, the results are in.

PSY already holds the record for the most viewed video of all time -- Gangnam Style now has an incredible 1.5 billion views -- but now he also set the record for the most views ever in a single day with the over 38 million "Gentleman" achieved on April 14th. Here's a chart of the incredible daily viewership so far:



Not surprisingly, PSY's new single quickly became April's top rising search on YouTube -- with worldwide interest first peaking on Monday April 15 and remaining high since -- and debuted at #1 on YouTube's music chart, bumping his previous hit to #2.

From a stats perspective, it's one of the biggest music video launches the web has ever seen. For some added perspective, "Gentleman" was seen 100 million times in less than 4 days in regions all over the world, a milestone that it took "Gangnam Style" nearly two months to achieve:



The previous single-day record was set by KONY 2012 last March.

-- Kevin Allocca

Note: 24-hour period measured via PST.