Already the most popular video in YouTube history, Gangnam Style on Friday took over as first to achieve 1 billion opinion of the Google-owned video-sharing site.
So whilst the world didn’t end on Dec. 21 as some were predicting, surely this counts on the Apocalypse in certain small way, right?
The official video (below) for South Korean rapper-singer PSY’s infectious, goofy-dance-driven hit was uploaded to YouTube on July 15. In just over five months, “Gangnam Style” eclipsed such YouTube mega-hits Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (currently at 813.5 million views), Jennifer Lopez’s “On the Floor” (632.7 million views), and also the venerable “Charlie Bit My Finger” (502.9 million views).
The viral video also spawned a pop culture movement in the United States and elsewhere, with athletes, celebrities, and in many cases Google chairman Eric Schmidt busting out signature “Gangnam Style” dance moves in several public venues in the last several months.
How unlikely was it that a song name-dropping Seoul’s Gangnam District and sung almost entirely in a language with under 100 million native speakers would become a worldwide hit of such unimaginable magnitude? We’ll hire others to dissect the obviously winning formula of “Gangnam Style,” but as the Verge notes, the success of the video is obviously “a evidence of just how deeply technology is rooted inside our culture” and the raw power of runaway Internet memes.
Meanwhile, PSY’s mega-hit has been dropping other YouTube records like flies during its meteoric run on it site. “Gangnam Style” passed Bieber’s “Baby” because most-viewed video on YouTube on Nov. 24. The video also were built with a record 6.2 million likes on YouTube since Friday evening. Amazingly, “Gangnam Style” has less than 450,000 dislikes on the spot, for the like-to-dislike ratio approaching 14:1. By comparison, “Baby” currently has about 1.5 million likes but additionally 3.3 million dislikes.
“Gangnam Style” is the lead single on PSY’s sixth K-pop album, the six-track PSY 6 (Six Rules), Part 1 (that’s a great deal of 6′s, only to circle back for the Apocalypse thing). A companion album, PSY 6 (Six Rules), Part 2, is set for release in March. For all the success of the “Gangnam Style” video, the album itself has sold lower than 100,000 copies in South Korea, as outlined by reports.
Source:
http://www.sharedtutor.com/2012/12/gangnam-style-hits-1-billion-youtube.html