YouTube announced the latest milestone for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s ‘Despacito’ yesterday: its official music video has become the first ever video to reach 7bn views on YouTube.
Another stat from the announcement is just as notable though: the video is still being watched 1.4m times a day on average, despite having been released in January 2017.
We can also do some comparison with another prominent music service, Spotify. The ‘Despacito’ video passed 6bn YouTube views in February 2019, so it’s added 1bn views in the 20 months since, although its daily view count has halved (from 2.8m) in that time.
Back then, the original version of the track had 956.1m streams on Spotify, while its Justin Bieber-featuring remix had 1.2bn. Now they’re at 1.17bn and 1.39bn streams respectively – around 453m extra Spotify streams over that 20-month period.
That’s half the total for the official video on YouTube, but bear in mind there are other videos for ‘Despacito’ plus UGC views to add on to that.
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