Whether you’re a Bieber fan, or a music lover, it’s hard to deny this guy’s got serious marketability. Case in point: Bieber is the first musician ever to crack 10 billion views on Vevo, which happened over the course of six years.
What’s most shocking is that 4 billion of those views have happened since September of 2015, when he released content from his most recent album Purpose. Love him or hate him, that gargantuan number puts him in a category all his own.
The new video for Bieber’s hit song Sorry has amassed 1.1 billion views on its own, while another single, Love Yourself, has nearly half a billion. And, of course, incessant smash single Baby has long had a 10-digit view count.
Bieber has remained at the top of Vevo’s charts for an astonishing 19 consecutive weeks, and is one of only three artists to have two videos with over a billion views, joined by Katy Perry and Taylor Swift.
What’s more, the Biebs is about to take another crown as the first artist to have three videos with over a billion plays; The video for single What Do You Mean has 885 million views at the time of publication, and will likely hit the mark in the next several months, if not sooner.
The tremendous amount of views Bieber has garnered over the years is impressive, regardless of his stance with music critics. In, fact, it’s especially noteworthy how exceptionally popular Bieber’s music has remained in his six years on Vevo, despite the singer having been marred by various public controversies.
But Vevo was destined to produce a 10 billion view artist sometime; Bieber’s new record is just the most recent in a long line of record view counts to be announced by Vevo this year, as streaming music plays on all services continue to skyrocket.
Most recently, David Bowie posthumously set an all time 24-hour viewership record on the video service, with 51 million views following his tragic death. That record was previously broken by Adele, with the insanely-popular Hello video, and Taylor Swift with Bad Blood before that.
If viewership continues to rise at this pace, the 10-billion view club won’t be lonely for long.
