This one is going to get the K-Pop stans roused up. In April 2019, BTS broke the record for one-day video views on YouTube, with the 78m views of their ‘Boy With Luv’ video trumping the previous record-holder, ‘Kill This Love’ by fellow K-Pop group Blackpink. Now the record has been broken again… by Blackpink!
Their new single ‘How You Like That’ raced to 82.4m views in 24 hours after its release on Friday (26 June) according to Engadget – at the time of writing it’s on 141.5m views. This is under YouTube’s tweaked methodology that doesn’t count views as ads, following a controversy last year when Indian star Badshah and his label Sony Music claimed to have broken BTS’ record, only to be denied by YouTube due to their use of paid advertising views.
Anyway, Blackpink are the new record holders, but we suspect BTS’s famous ‘Army’ will be strategising to take it back with their next big music video release. Either way, the battle is a sign not just of K-Pop’s global clout and the organisation of its superfans, but of the continued growth in scale for music on YouTube too.
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