For a while now, Music Ally has been covering the huge views being notched up by Indian musicians on YouTube, as revealed in the service’s global music chart. There’s an interesting story this week, where seven of YouTube’s top 10 music artists by views are from India. They include ninth-ranked Lata Mangeshkar, enjoying her 194th week on YouTube’s top 100 chart, with 158m views of her music in the week of 28 February to 5 March. That’s more than Lil Baby (75.8m) and The Weeknd (74.2m) put together, as a comparison.
To people who haven’t been following the trends in YouTube’s chart, Mangeshkar may seem like an unlikely YouTube success: she’s a 90 year-old ‘playback singer’ (the phrase used for artists in India who record tracks that are then mimed to in films by actors) who’s been recording music since the early 1940s. Part of a musical family – one of her siblings is Asha Bhosle, another popular star – she has also been a Member of Parliament in India. And now a YouTube star, thanks to a number of her classic songs being uploaded as music videos by a range of Indian channels. Mangeshkar’s music has been played 653m times on YouTube in the last 28 days alone, and 7.66bn times in the last 12 months, with nearly 87% of the latter figure coming from Indian YouTube users.
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
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