The second and fourth most popular YouTube channels in the world last month were music-focused, but not from major artists.
Indian channel T-Series, which gathers Bollywood music videos and film trailers, was the second biggest YouTube channel (by views) in May with 572.3m views, while Turkish channel netd müzik was fourth with 523m views that month.
They were joined in the top 10 by Justin Bieber’s Vevo channel, with 440.2m views.
The success of T-Series and netd müzik is no surprise to anyone who follows the monthly chart on online-video industry site Tubefilter, which is based on data from analytics firm OpenSlate.
Both channels are long-term regulars in the upper reaches of the chart, with steadily-growing view counts. In the first five months of 2016 so far, T-Series generated 2.55bn video views, while netd müzik had 2.38bn.
T-Series in particular is building a loyal fanbase on YouTube, ending May with 10.7 million subscribers to its channel. netd müzik ended the month with nearly 3.1 million subscribers. As we’ve noted before, the latter followed in the footsteps of another hugely successful Turkish music channel, Mü-Yap which abruptly shut down in 2014.
Its successor and T-Series’ success offers yet another angle on the music industry’s relationship with YouTube, the public discussion of which tends to be dominated by western artists and labels.
As usual, the Tubefilter chart offers some surprises in what kinds of other channels are most popular on YouTube. The top-ranked channel by views remains toy-unboxing site Ryan’s Toys Review, with 653m views in May.
And if you really want to freak your boss out today with some “research” into YouTube trends, take a look at third-ranked channel Webs & Tiaras (544.7m views) with its day-glo live-action mash-ups of Spider-Man, Elsa from Frozen and other pop-culture characters:
What times we live in!
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