K-Pop Group, BTS, Break YouTube Viewing Record, AGAIN

The community K-Pop group, BTS, are regarded by respected music magazines and shows as the most engaging musical artist or group of this century. And they have lived up to their tag, as their YouTube channel, Hype Labels, with 58.3 million subscribers, smashed the record for the number of cumulative views in a less than 24 hour period.

This achievement was accomplished thanks to a peemiere broadcast of their new single, Butter, accompanied by a music video. The South Korean boy band have now set the bar even higher and the song now sits top of the trending video list in YouTube.

In less than a day, their new track, “Butter”, recorded 113 million views, smashing the previous record of 101.1 million views also set by the band in August 2020, with the song Dynamite.

The song like Dynamite, is an English Language song, making it their second attempt at the Western language. Dynamite has already amassed over a billion views on YouTube alone.

Despite South Koreans not having the strongest community on the platform, no other YouTube channel has been able to rival the 7-man group on this stage.

On the ranking of the most popular channels from YouTube, BTS ranked in 17th position as at 15 May.

This leaves them as not even the most popular artist from the Asian nation as South Korean girl band “BlackPink” boast a following of 61.4 million subscribers. Canadian act, Justin Bieber sits at 12th position with 63.2 million subscribers. While the leader of the pack is Indian movie channel, T-Series, with 183 million subscribers.

K-Pop, More Than Just a Genre of Music

Last June, during the #BlackLiveMatters protests, K-Pop fans put their strike force at the service of this anti-racist movement.

By using spamming, these fans managed to supplant racist posts using various hashtags in opposition to the movement. This horde of followers are also able to mobilize to blow up servers, as was the case with the Dallas police application which has remained out of service due to too many connections.

K-Pop fans therefore manage to make themselves heard without using the conventional violent route of public demonstration. They air their voices by just staying in front of their computer or smartphone, an army of keypad warriors.

YouTube have, in recent times, been considered as an aging platform in comparison with its supposedly more modern competitors in Twitch or TikTok.

However, they have been vindicated by this record which proves the opposite by presenting Google’s platform as being full of features that open a great leeway to development.

Record labels attach a lot of importance to the score achieved in 24 hours for a new clip. We must therefore expect that this record will be broken many times by another clip.