& nbsp; November Rain & # 39; is the oldest song with a billion views on YouTube – what does it mean?

Earlier this week, the Guns' video for Roses for "November Rain" took an important step: Released in 1992, it's the oldest video broadcast a billion times on YouTube .

This realization speaks of many phenomena at once: the tremendous power of the Guns N 'Roses, l & # 39; ambition of a song and d & # 39; a video exceeding nine minutes and the need to consider "November Rain" as "Stairway to Heaven" by C & # 39; is the time. The band remains a huge draw in Central and South America, where it runs frequently and has gone to great lengths to propel it – and, in particular, dozens of Latin artists – across the billion views . (Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan broke it a bit last year.) It turns out that the most-watched video of the 1945s [19659003] at just under 700 million, is Guns N "Roses" Sweet Child O "Mien."

But the milestone "November Rain" also speaks of other phenomena. For this story, a YouTube representative has placed a ranked list of each music video to exceed one billion views – "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee is by far, followed by Wiz Khalifa's pair "See You Again" and Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" – and "November Rain" is overtaken by a whopping 112 clips. YouTube itself was launched in 2005, and many licensees have adopted the platform only several years later (Universal Music Group and Google launched Vevo in 2009 to allow the big label to keep the control of his musical video content). The list of views mainly provides a tour of the dominant singles of the last decade.

What YouTube metrics for old songs do not always provide, is therefore an airtight sense of how often videos were viewed in the era of the Internet. Take the case of "Never Gonna Give You Up," Rick Astley's 1987 topper that gave birth to the Internet phenomenon known as "rickrolling," the practice of hyperlinking to what promises to happen. be a sought-after content. "Never Gonna Give Up" video. This joke drove many, people to a copy of the Astley video on YouTube, but it was not the authorized video that did not reach the site before 2009 and now has 456 million views. The video of the original joke, titled "RickRoll & # 39; d", was released in 2007 and then removed because it was a violation of the terms of use, and then added later, now has $ 77 million. views. Other versions spice up the site, adding a few hundred thousand views here and there.

Of course, if the practice of rickrolling was born this morning instead of more than a decade ago, "Never Gonna Give You Up" could pass in front of "November Rain" at Christmas. Think about the reach of YouTube and its user base since 2007: the first iPhone has not been launched before the end of the year, far fewer people have access to broadband and the Licensees initially considered YouTube as a hacking place. (encapsulated, perhaps, in the recently settled "Dancing Baby" case, which saw Universal Music Group sue a mother for uploading a video of her baby dancing while Prince's song was playing in the background). We thought the same were traveling fast at that time, but we had no idea.

At least for the moment, the reign of "November Rain" is pretty safe. Titles that are bubbling a little under a billion – songs from Shakira, J Balvin, Mike Posner, One Direction, ZAYN and Coldplay, among others – are all much more recent, while other mainstream videos 90s (Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana "Zombie", et al) cranberries at least until here are in the 750 million range.

Of course, lest we confuse any of these metrics with real power, here is another statistic for you: At the time of writing these lines, the classic video of Guns N Roses for November Rain is about 286 million views. F "by Crazy Frog, so we all have work to do