One of the factors in YouTube’s viewing increase (see story higher up this bulletin) is the fact that schools are closed in many countries, and children are getting (even) more time on screens. At the younger end of the age range, that’s having a notable impact on the figures for children’s music channels.
Witness the latest Top 50 Channels chart on industry site Tubefilter, which ranks YouTube channels by their global views. For once, the biggest channel on YouTube last week *wasn’t* Indian music firm T-Series. Instead it was US-based nursery-rhymes channel Cocomelon, which racked up 905.6m views in the week of 21-27 April alone. For a sense of the coronavirus impact, in the week of 24 February – 1 March, Cocomelon did 606m views – so its current weekly views are up by nearly 50%. Other nursery-rhyme channels are experiencing similar spikes: for example YouTube’s tenth-biggest channel Little Baby Bum has grown from 176.1m weekly views to 274.4m over the same period.
This isn’t just a YouTube trend however. Indian site RadioAndMusic has some stats from Sony Music’s Sony Music Kids brand: its music has been streamed more than 2m times in April so far, up from nearly 1m in March, with 90% of those streams happening on JioSaavn.
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